Half-Real
Half-Real
Video Games between Real Rules
and Fictional Worlds
Jesper Juul
Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Video Games and the Classic Game Model 23
3 Rules 55
4 Fiction 121
5 Rules and Fiction 163
6 Conclusions 197
Notes 203
References 211
Index 227
Preface
It began on a slow summer afternoon, playing countless games of tic-tactoe
against a childhood friend. The contest was exhilarating, and we tracked the
tally carefully until, to our surprise, every game began ending up as a draw.
This was unexpected, but we had reached a point where we understood the
game well enough to play it perfectly. We had exhausted the game, and we
discussed its strategic patterns: If your opponent begins in the middle,
always pick a corner.
Some time later, at the age of eleven, I created a racing game on an early
computer terminal: I drew a racetrack made of Xs and moved the cursor
around the track as quickly as I could (timing each lap with a digital watch),
carefully making sure that my car (the cursor) did not collide with the
barriers (the Xs). My game looked something like this:
I Figure P.1 I
Almost a video game.
What had I created? It was a game by most counts. But it was and it was not
a video game: It took place on a screen, and though the terminal's processing
power was modest, I had really designed a game on a computer. However, it
was not a video game in the usual sense since it was me, and not the
computer, that was upholding the rules.
In addition to setting up the rules of the game, I had also performed an act
of imagination-I imagined the green characters on the black screen to be
something else, a racetrack and a car, and I imagined that the movement of
the cursor was the movement of a car. None of this required any cleverness:
setting up a game with rules and goals was easy because I had at that time
been exposed to hundreds or perhaps thousands of games, and imagining a
rectangular cursor I to be something else-a car-is easy for a child. I had also
tried and thoroughly enjoyed a handful of computer and video games, and I
sensed that there was a basic connection between computers and games. It
was a connection that I urgently wanted to explore.
While the present book is the result of many twists and turns and changes of
mind, it is also a book whose basic issues are clearly visible in the tictac-toe
bout and in my crude video game of some twenty-three years ago: What
does it take for something to be a video game, and when is a video game
enjoyable? How do rules in games work, and how do they provide
enjoyment for players? How and why does the player imagine the world of a
game?
As for the first question, the object of this book is games played using
computer power, where the computer upholds the rules of the game and
where the game is played using a video display. I will be using video games
as an umbrella term to describe all such PC, console, arcade, and other
digital games.
I must thank the following bright minds for influencing me during the
creation of this book: Susana Pajares Tosca, Lisbeth Klastrup, Espen
Aarseth, Aki Jarvinen, Gonzalo Frasca, Marie-Laure Ryan, Markku
Eskelinen, Troels Degn Johansson, Henry Jenkins, Eric Zimmerman, Jill
Walker, Mikkel Holm Sorensen, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Peter Bogh
Andersen, Lars Konzack, T. L. Taylor, Miguel Sicart Vila, Kim Forum
Jacobsen, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Clara Fernandez-Vera, Chaim Gingold,
Anker Helms Jorgensen, Rasmus Keldorff, and the people at MIT Press.
Thanks to Mads Rydahl for the line art and thanks to the tireless readers,
Susana and Lisbeth.
The precursor of the book was produced on a Ph.D. grant at the IT
University of Copenhagen between October 2000 and October 2003. Much
of it was written between February and July 2003 during my stay at
Comparative Media Studies, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Some parts of this book have previously been published:
• Most of chapter 2 was published as "The Game, the Player, the World:
Looking for a Heart of Gameness," in Level Up: Digital Games Research
Conference Proceedings, edited by Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens,
30-45. Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2003.
• Part of chapter 3's section on emergence and progression was published as
"The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of
Progression," in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference
Proceedings, edited by Frans Mayra, 323-329. Tampere: Tampere
University Press, 2002.
• An earlier version of chapter 4's section on time was published as
"Introduction to Game Time," in First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan,
131-142. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
• Parts of the conclusions were published as "Just What Is It That Makes
Computer Games So Different, So Appealing?," Ivory Tower column for
IGDA, April 2003. Available at <http: www.idga.org/colunms/
ivorytower/ivory_Apr03 .php>.
• Some of the notes on Grand Theft Auto III were taken from the article
"Hvad Spillet Betyder" [What the Game Means], in Digitale Verdener,
edited by Ida Engholm and Lisbeth Klastrup, 181-195. Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 2004.
INTRODUCTION
In the title, Half-Real refers to the fact that video games are two different
things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules
with which players actually interact, and in that winning or losing a game is
a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the
dragon is not a real dragon but a fictional one. To play a video game is
therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a
video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.
Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo 2003a) in figure 1.1 has
been praised for its expressive graphics, lavish world, and detailed storyline.
In the picture, the player's character has traveled far from his home island in
search of his recently abducted little sister. In addition to the fictional world
of the game, not only does a variety of on-screen displays provide the player
with much information, there is also a curious arrow bouncing over the small
girl in the flower field. The arrow indicates that we are playing a game with
rules and a goal to work toward. It tells us that we can interact with the girl,
and that she may help us progress in the game. It also illustrates that
although the graphics depict an elaborate fictional world, only a small part of
this world is actually implemented in the rules of the game; and the arrow
indicates which part of the game fiction can also be found in these rules.
Thereby Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker points to a fictional world, and it
points to the rules of the game. These are the two things that video games are
made of: real rules and fictional worlds.
In having fictional worlds, video games deviate from traditional
nonelectronic games that are mostly abstract,' and this is part of the newness
of video games. The interaction between game rules and game fiction is one
of the most important features of video games, and it is a central theme of
this book. Their interaction is present in many aspects of games: in the
design of the games themselves; in the way we perceive and use games; and
in the way we discuss games. This interaction gives the player a choice
between imagining the world of the game and seeing the representation as a
mere placeholder for information about the rules of the game.
I Figure 1.1 1
Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo 2003a): The
arrow points to what is important according to the rules of
the game.
In addition, we face a choice between a focus on the game itself or on the
player of the game: We can examine the rules as they are found
mechanically in the game program or in the manual of a board game, or we
can examine the rules as something that players negotiate and learn, and at
which they gradually improve their skill. We can also treat the fictional
world as a fixed set of signs that the game presents, and we can treat the
fictional world as something that the game cues the player into imagining
and that players then imagine in their own ways. This book's intent is to
integrate these disparate perspectives into a coherent theory of video games.
I Figure 1.2 1
Alan Kotok, Steve Russel, and I M. Graetz playing Space
war! Courtesy of the Computer History Museum.
The Old and the New
The history of video games is both very brief and very long. The first video
game was probably the 1961 Spacewar! (figure 1.2) (Russell 1961). The
video game is thus a little more than forty years old, and it has been part of
popular culture for around thirty years. Compare this to the roughly seventyfive years of television, a hundred years of film, and five hundred years of
the printing press. Therefore, video games are a comparatively new cultural
form, intimately linked to the appearance of computers, postdating literature,
cinema, and television. However, if we think of video games as games, they
are not successors of cinema, print literature, or new media, but
continuations of a history of games that predate these by millennia. The
Egyptian board game, senet (figure 1.3), found in the 2686 BC tomb of
Hesy-re is a precursor of contemporary backgammon and Parcheesi, games
that are commonly played using computers today. Therefore, the question is
not whether video games are old or new, but how video games are games,
how they borrow from nonelectronic games, and how they depart from
traditional game forms.
I Figure 1.3 1
Queen Nefretiry playing senet. Ca. 1250 BC. Egyptian
Expedition of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers
Fund, 1930. (30.4.145) Photograph ©1978 The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But why do we even play games using computer power rather than using
other recent inventions such as the telephone, microwave ovens, cars, or
airplanes? There appears to be a basic affinity between games and
computers: Like the printing press and cinema have historically promoted
and enabled new kinds of storytelling, computers work as enablers of games,
letting us play old games in new ways, and allowing for new types of games
that would previously not have been possible.
Games as Rules
The rules of a game provide the player with challenges that the player cannot
trivially overcome. It is a basic paradox of games that while the rules
themselves are generally definite, unambiguous, and easy to use, the
enjoyment of a game depends on these easy-to-use rules presenting
challenges that cannot be easily overcome. Playing a game is an activity of
improving skills in order to overcome these challenges, and playing a game
is therefore fundamentally a learning experience. This takes different forms
in different games, but we can outline two basic ways in which games are
structured and provide challenges for players: that of emergence (a number
of simple rules combining to form interesting variations) and that of
progression (separate challenges presented serially).
Emergence is the primordial game structure, where a game is specified as
a small number of rules that combine and yield large numbers of game
variations for which the players must design strategies to handle. This is
found in card and board games, in sports, and in most action and all strategy
games.
Progression is the historically newer structure that became part of the
video game through the adventure genre. In progression games, the player
has to perform a predefined set of actions in order to complete the game.
One feature of the progression game is that it yields strong control to the
game designer: since the designer controls the sequence of events,
progression games are also where we find most games with storytelling
ambitions.
Though games may be different in structure, a player approaches every
game with whatever repertoire of skills he or she has, and then improves
these skills in the course of playing the game. To play a game is to improve
your repertoire of skills, and the challenge of game design is to work with
the skill set of the player through the game.
Games as Fiction
Most video games create fictional worlds, but games do this in their own
special tentative and flickering way: the hero dies and is respawned
moments later; the strategy game lets players "build" new people in a few
seconds; the player dies and loads a save game in order to continue just
before he or she died; in-game characters talk about the game controllers that
the player is using. These things mean that the fictional worlds of many
games are contradictory and incoherent, but the player may not experience
this as such since the rules of the game can provide a sense of direction even
when the fictional world has little credibility. In fact, the player's experience
of the game fiction appears not to require much consistency-the world of a
game is something that the player can often choose to imagine at will.
Fiction plays a different role in different games and game genres, and
while some players may be thrilled by the fiction of a game, others may
dismiss it as unimportant decoration of the game rules. Nevertheless, there is
a general scale from the highly replayable multiplayer game (the emergence
game) where the player can gradually begin to ignore the fiction to, at the
other extreme, the "complete-once" adventure game (the progression game),
where the player only faces each setting once and is therefore more likely to
take the fictional world at face value.
What a Game Is
In this book, I have tried to examine what (if any) similarities can be found
between the majority of the things we call "games," while at the same time
being open to considerations of historical change and potential discussion
about borderline cases. The classic game model presented in chapter 2 is a
snapshot of a specific way of creating "games," a model that can be traced
historically for thousands of years. The classic game model consists of six
features that work on three different levels: the level of the game itself, as a
set of rules; the level of the player's relation to the game; and the level of the
relation between the activity of playing the game and the rest of the world.
According to this model, a game is
1. a rule-based formal system;
2. with variable and quantifiable outcomes;
3. where different outcomes are assigned different values;
4. where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome;
5. the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome;
6. and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.
The six features of the model are necessary and sufficient for something to
be a game, meaning that all games have these six features, and that having
these features is enough to constitute a game. While we can imagine any
number of other phenomena that have only some of these features, this
specific intersection is uniquely productive, allowing for the huge variation
and creativity that we are witnessing in games.
This game model is the basis upon which games are constructed. It
corresponds to the celluloid of movies; it is like the canvas of painting or the
words of the novel. The game model does not mean that all games are the
same, but that with these six features we can talk about how games are
different from each other. Additionally, the model does not tie games to any
specific medium, and games are therefore transnnedial in the same way that
storytelling is transmedial. Storytelling is a transmedial phenomenon since
many different media can tell stories; games are a transmedial phenomenon
since many different media (or tools) can be used for playing games.
While video games mostly conform to the classic game model, they also
modify the conventions of the classic model. Games have changed. So while
it makes sense to see games as a fairly well defined form, this book is also
about how video games modify and supplement the classic game model; the
history of video games is partly about breaking with the classic game model.
The Study of Video Games
This book was born from a brief and turbulent history of video game studies.
It is a response to a number of questions that have been raised in numerous
conferences, seminars, articles, and discussions over the past few years. It is
also a book that does not rest easily with any one tradition, but neither did it
appear out of thin air. Rather my work has consisted of collecting pieces
from as many different fields and people as possible, while testing my ideas
on as many different audiences as I could. As the history of the video game
invokes a history of non-electronic games, video game studies must admit a
debt to the study of non-electronic games.
Games for Other Purposes
For reasons that escape us, games have lingered under the cultural radar for
thousands of years, and most of the commentaries that touch on games have
been using the idea of games for other purposes.
Famously, the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used the concept
of games' for building his philosophy of language, and games were singled
out as an exemplary case of something that could not be defined or narrowed
down. Games also inspired a theory that discusses a relation between rules
and representation: Structuralists such as Vladimir Propp and Claude LeviStrauss claimed that meaning or narratives were based on formal structures
(Pavel 1986; Propp 1968). Ferdinand de Saussure found chess to be
inspirational for linguistics; as he wrote, "a state of the board in chess
corresponds exactly to a state of the language. The value of the chess pieces
depends on their position upon the chess board, just as in the language each
term has its value through its contrast with all other terms" ([1916] 2000,
88). Therefore, the meaning of a chess piece stems from its relation to other
pieces in the game, and is independent of its shape or makeup.
Games are usually well structured problems, and this has led to their
being used in several other fields. John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern's 1944 book on game theory, Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior (1953), deals primarily with economics, but in a way that has some
relevance for the general study of games. Their economic game theory uses
games as a general term for a specific type of problem. Game theory
provides a generalized description of different types of strategies, and even
though its focus is not on "games" that are meant to be enjoyed, it turns out
that the formal game theoretical properties can yield important insights into
games and game playing. For example, a game with a dominant strategy (a
strategy that is better than all other strategies) is often boring because the
player is not challenged in any way.
It is also the well structured character of games that have made them into
a stable of artificial intelligence research. In 1950, Claude Shannon proposed
using chess as a starting point for developing the modern "general purpose
computer":
The chess machine is an ideal one to start with, since: (1) the problem is
sharply defined both in allowed operations (the moves) and in the ultimate
goal (checkmate); (2) it is neither so simple as to be trivial nor too difficult
for satisfactory solution; (3) chess is generally considered to require
"thinking" for skilful play; a solution of this problem will force us either to
admit the possibility of a mechanized thinking or to further restrict our
concept of "thinking"; (4) the discrete structure of chess fits well into the
digital nature of modern computers. (Shannon 1950)
What the development of chess playing programs actually demonstrated was
that humans play chess (and solve problems) in many different ways, and
usually not as the early chess programs did, which was by considering as
many chess positions as possible. In this way, the development of chess
programs has been connected to cognitive science, where many studies have
been conducted of how humans actually play games. Specifically, Adriaan
D. De Groot's (1965) study of chess players looks into the psychology of
play rather than the purely strategic aspect of play. Games and game-like
problems have been commonly used for studying human problem solvingfor example, in the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon (1972).
Finally, as Marcel Danesi has explored, games and puzzle solving have
yielded many mathematical insights and methods. For example, the field of
graph theory originates from the mathematician Leonhard Euler's study of
the Konigsberg Bridge Problem: whether seven bridges in the city of
Konigsberg could be traversed without crossing any bridge more than once
(Danesi 2002, 19-22; Weisstein 2004). All of this demonstrates that gamerelated research has historically mostly been concerned with using games for
studying other matters, and the insights reached concerning games have
mostly been incidental to this research.
Games for Their Own Sake
In the study of games for their own sake, the field has been widely scattered
historically. It probably flourished first in the late nineteenth century around
folklore studies, for example in the work of Stewart Culin's 1907 Games of
the North American Indians (1992), an 800-page collection and
categorization of the games of Native Americans. Game studies also
flourished around 1970. For example, E. M. Avedon and Brian SuttonSmith's anthology The Study of Games3 (1971) is an excellent overview of
theory on non-electronic games, collecting articles into sections on the
history of games, the usage of games, and the structure and function of
games. The Study of Games demonstrates that the narrow history of game
research has mostly been sociological, anthropological, or philosophical, but
not very well developed as an aesthetic field. That is, while much space has
been devoted to the study of people (other than the researcher) playing
games, very little has been said about the first-person experience of playing
a game.
The two classic texts of game studies are Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens
(1950) and Roger Caillois's Man, Play, and Games (1961). For my purposes
here, they suffer from the same problem of covering a broader area than
games in that both discuss rule-based games as well as free-form play. Johan
Huizinga focuses on play as a central component of all culture, but provides
only sketchy discussions about games as such. Caillois is best known for his
categorization of games (and play) into agon (competition), alea (chance),
mimicry (simulation or make-believe), and ilinx (vertigo). If anything,
Caillois demonstrates that categorizations need to clearly reflect their goals
and presuppositions, since in actuality games are not choices between
chance and competition, or even placed on a scale between them, but rather
almost all games are competitive and contain varying amounts of chance. It
seems more reasonable to describe chance as one single example of a
multitude of game design principles (as discussed in chapter 3) on the same
level as showing or hiding information, mutual or contradictory goals, etc.
Likewise, while ilinx (vertigo) is certainly a part of many physical game
activities and of many video games, it is but a single example of the infinite
number of different types of experiences that a game can give.
A complementary examination of games is provided by Bernard Suits's
philosophically oriented dialogue The Grasshopper (1978), where a series of
game definitions are proposed and discussed. Suits is best known for his
description of games as letting the player reach the goal using only the less
efficient means available. Suits belongs to a tradition of sports philosophy
that has grown largely around the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. This
book is intended to be less purely philosophical than sports philosophy, but
on the other hand more aesthetically oriented than play studies, a field that is
often oriented toward the play of children. R. E. Herron and Brian SuttonSmith's Child's Play (1971) provides a good overview of the field, as does
Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play (1997).
Video Game Studies
The relatively short history of video games is complemented by an even
shorter history of research. It is only around the turn of the millennium that
video game studies began to come together as a field with its own
conferences, journals, and organizations. This brief history has been
something of a gold rush and a race toward being the first to point out
special aspects of games, to format the field, to define words, and to point to
similarities and dissimilarities between games and other cultural forms. This
is not the place for an exhaustive review of the field so far; I will simply
relate the discussions to which this book responds.
Video game studies have so far been a jumble of disagreements and
discussions with no clear outcomes, but this need not be a problem. The
discussions have often taken the form of simple dichotomies, and though
they are unresolved, they remain focal points in the study of games. The
most important conflicts here are games versus players, rules versus fiction,
games versus stories, games versus the broader culture, and game ontology
versus game aesthetics.
Games or Players
A basic dichotomy concerns whether we study the games themselves or the
players who play them. Economic game theory is arguably originally the
study of games as objects unrelated to players, but game theory does not rule
out discussion of player experiences-it is just outside the scope of game
theory. Still it would be perfectly possible to propose that we look
exclusively at the games "themselves," while ignoring the fact that they are
played by people. We can then at least imagine the reverse argument that
declares the rules of a game unimportant compared to the way they are
actually used. Linda Hughes has examined how a group of girls played
Foursquare.' This turns out to be a combination of official and unofficial
rules, conflicting success criteria, and rule negotiations. According to
Hughes, "Game rules can be interpreted and reinterpreted toward preferred
meanings and purposes, selectively invoked or ignored, challenged or
defended, changed or enforced to suit the collective goals of different groups
of players. In short, players can take the same game and collectively make of
it strikingly different experiences" (1999, 94). This is a convincing
argument, and part of a larger point that children's games cannot be
meaningfully described only as the rules that make them up. If we took this
argument to a logical extreme, we could claim that the game rules do not
matter at all. This argument would unfortunately imply that the children
might as well be fencing, playing poker, or playing rugby! A more detailed
analysis of Foursquare reveals that the protracted structure of the game, with
no clear termination, no final winner, and no clear score count allows the
players to play while having many other considerations than simply
perfecting their own performance. Moreover, the unclearness of some rules
such as the rule against slamming5 makes room for all kinds of social power
play. At the same time, the players have chosen to play this game rather than
other games, and players change the rules because they want to play this
game, with specific rules. We cannot ignore the role of the rules without
ignoring a basic aspect of the player experience: that different games yield
different kinds of experiences.
Rules or Fiction
The main argument of this book, that video games are rules and fiction, is a
response to a long history of discussions of whether games were one or the
other. As in Saussure's observations about chess, it has often been noted that
in a board game the actual shape of a piece appears unimportant in relation
to the rules. Erving Goffman has proposed a principle called rules of
irrelevance, meaning that the specific shape of a piece in a game is not
important:
[Games] illustrate how participants are willing to forswear for the duration
of the play any apparent interest in the aesthetic, sentimental, or monetary
value of the equipment employed, adhering to what might be called rules of
irrelevance. For example, it appears that whether checkers are played with
bottle tops on a piece of squared linoleum, with gold figurines on inlaid
marble, or with uniformed men standing on colored flagstones in a specially
arranged court square, the pairs of players can start with the `same' positions,
employ the same sequence of strategic moves and countermoves, and
generate the same contour of excitement. (Coffman 1972, 19)
Roger Caillois does not deny that games can have fiction, but surprisingly
states that games are rules or fiction, that rule-based games do not have a
make-believe element:
Despite the assertion's paradoxical character, I will state that in this instance
the fiction, the sentiment of as if replaces and performs the same function as
do rules. Rules themselves create fictions. The one who plays chess,
prisoner's base, polo, or baccara, by the very fact of complying with their
respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that
literally corresponds to any of these games. That is why chess, prisoner's
base, polo, and baccara are played for real. As if is not necessary.... Thus
games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or makebelieve. (Caillois 1961, 8-9)
The division is, however, contradicted by most modern board games and
video games. Most video games are ruled and make-believe.
In video game studies, the denial of fiction is an alluring position that I
have also previously taken (Juul 1998). It is based on a simple recurring
argument that tends to follow this pattern:
1. Rules are what makes a game a game.
2. Fiction is incidental to whether something is a game.
3. A game can be interesting without fiction.
4. A game with an interesting fictional world can be a terrible game.
5. Therefore, fiction in games is unimportant.
Though the conclusion is tempting, it is also false. Compare these two games
based on identical rules (and programming), but with different graphics. In
the first game (figure 1.4), the player controls a spaceship in a battle against
the heads of the hosts of a television program. In the second game (figure
1.5), the player controls a spaceship in a battle against various theories, in
this case a narratological model.
In a 1998 paper, I compared two games based on this program, and my
conclusion was as follows: "As you can see, the symbolical or metaphorical
meaning of the game is not connected to the program or the gameplay. The
relationship is, in a word, arbitrary" (Juul 1998).
This idea that the representation of a game is irrelevant appears to have a
constant allure, but it also break down upon further scrutiny. The game
designer Frank Lantz has provided a similar argument based on design
experiences:
I Figure 1.4 1
Puls in Space (Juul 1998a).
I Figure 1.5 1
Game Liberation (Juul 2000).
I began to think about how structure and representation work in games.
There was a notion buried in my original idea, the idea of a fundamental
separation between a game's structure and whatever subject matter or
activity or setting the game represents. The implication was that you could
take any number of different structures and match them up with various
themes for different effects, but there wasn't any deep, essential relationship
between any particular theme and any particular game mechanic....
After a couple of months of hanging my head against it, this notion
seemed less certain, or at least less interesting....
There are, of course, many relationships between theme and structure in a
game. Whether or not any of those relationships are essential, they are
complex and vital enough to resist my attempt to lightly shuffle them
around. (Lantz 2004, 310)
This strongly suggests that the relation between rules and fiction in the
games in figure 1.4 and 1.5 is not arbitrary. Rather, these two games are
satirical. In the first case they stage the love/hate relationship that viewers
may have with television personalities as a deep-space battle. In the second
case they stage an academic discussion-defending games against theoretical
imperialism-as a deep space battle. Both are based on a background of some
existing antagonism-and that is why they work, because the rules fit the
representation-in an allegorical way.
Games Telling Stories
The early years of video game studies were often conceived as a discussion
between narratology (games as stories) versus ludology (games as something
unique). This discussion tended to alternate between being a superficial
battle of words and an earnest exploration of meaningful issues (Murray
1997; Frasca 1999; Juul 1999; Eskelinen 2001b; King and Krzywinska
2002b; Atkins 2003; Aarseth 2004a; Jenkins 2004). Video game studies did
not appear in a vacuum, so we need to remember the history that led up to
this discussion. While narratology originated from Aristotle's Poetics and the
study of storytelling media such as drama, novels, and films, the concept of
narrative is today commonly used in a much broader sense. We can speak of
a narrative turn after which it has become common to see narrative as the
primary way in which we make sense of and structure the world. From this
perspective, such different things as scientific discourse, the ideology of a
nation, and our understanding of our personal lives are structured in the
same way, using narratives. Espen Aarseth (2004a) has criticized this for
being an unproductive ideology of narrativism. Outside game studies,
Thomas Pavel (1986) has called this mythocen- trism.. The description of
games as storytelling systems often overlaps with the prescriptive idea that
video games (or "interactive narratives") would be better if they were more
like stories. Building on Aristotle, Brenda Laurel (1986) has proposed a
system for generating well formed plots. In this system, the computer
program must take on the role of an author while the game progresses and
make sure that regardless of the player's actions, every game session
becomes well formed. Janet Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997)
describes the similar utopia of a holodeck-a completely immersive and
transparent environment in which a user/player can engage in a well formed
story. While this is in itself an overwhelming technical challenge, the logical
problem is that there is no compelling argument demonstrating that a well
formed "narrative" would be a more interesting player experience.6
Ludology is broadly taken to mean "the study of games." The history of
the word itself is something of a mystery-its earliest known usage is from
1982 (Csikszentmihalyi 1982). Ludology was probably popularized by
Gonzalo Frasca's 1999 article "Ludology Meets Narratology." I first used it
in my paper "What Computer Games Can and Can't Do" (Juul 2000). From
the outset, ludology has often been perceived as focused on distancing itself
from narratology, and as trying to carve out video game studies as a separate
academic field.
Some more recent theory has tried to stake something of a middle ground
where the unique qualities of games are not denied, but the function of
fiction or story in a game can still be discussed. In Rune Klevjer's paper "In
Defense of Cutscenes" (2002), he criticizes "radical ludology" for
completely dismissing cut-scenes (cinematic intermissions in games), and
argues that cut-scenes serve several positive functions: they provide a
unifying logic for the game and rewards for the player's actions.
Additionally, Wibroe, Nygaard, and Andersen's article "Games and Stories"
(2001) offers a nuanced discussion of game-story relations.
From the other end of the spectrum, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska
(2002a) have discussed the relationship between games and cinema as a
complex relationship with synergy and mutual inspiration as well as some
notable differences. As an attempt at bridge-building between the open
structure of games and the closed structure of stories, the concept of quests
has been proposed by Ragnhild Tronstad (2001), Espen Aarseth (2004b), and
Susana Tosca (2003). Quests in games can actually provide an interesting
type of bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the game can
contain a predefined sequence of events that the player then has to actualize
or enact. This is discussed as a progression structure in chapter 3, and the
relation between games and stories is discussed at the end of chapter 4.
Games or the Broader Culture
In a broader perspective, Henry Jenkins (2003) sees video games as part of a
bigger complex of transmedia storytelling, where content can move between
different media. In this broad sense of storytelling, video games are part of a
general ecology of transmedia storytelling, but on a level that is often closer
to the level of toys and merchandising than to the level of movies or novels.
Realistically, video games are to some degree part of a general storytelling
ecology, incorporating at least some elements of popular stories.
Just as we can choose to discuss games or players, we can also choose
between studying a specific game for its role in the general media ecology or
focusing on the game itself and the playing of the game. There is no reason
to commit ourselves to one side of the discussion.
The added perspective in this book is that video games are also part of a
general game ecology, where the video game incorporates other kinds of
games and inspires other types of games.
Game Ontology or Game Aesthetics
We can also choose to discuss what video games are (ontology) or what they
should be and what makes them enjoyable (aesthetics). In practice, this can
be quite muddled: The video game researcher is usually (and arguably
should be) a big fan of video games, and hence the game researcher enters
the field with preferences for specific types of games, and the selection of
games influences the researcher's arguments.
The extreme version of this is the game review, written with the explicit
purpose of evaluating the quality of a game. I will be quoting reviews from
several sources in order to discuss the relative merits of different games and
different ways of structuring games. Game reviews provide documentation
about the informal vocabulary that is used in the video game community. It
is worth remembering that terminology is continually developed and
discussed outside academia, and that this, too, is worthy of attention.
One issue is to what extent game research should deal with game design.
The game development community has in recent years produced a large
body of interesting books and articles. Chris Crawford's seminal The Art of
Computer Game Design (1982) is an early discussion of video game design,
but for the purpose of this book, more relevant discussions can be found in
Richard Rouse's Game Design Theory and Practice (2001) and Andrew
Rollings and Dave Morris's Game Architecture and Design (2000). Game
development writings cover a variety of different subjects including
programming, artificial intelligence, 3-D graphics modeling, 3D texturing,
sound, music, team building, team management, as well as what is closest to
my focus, game design. I will refer to a number of articles and presentations
from Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra, and the annual Game
Developers' Conference.
If game design and game research often fall into separate camps, Katie
Salen and Eric Zimmerman's book Rules of Play (2004) is a good example
of how they can overlap. Working on the three levels of rules, play, and
culture, Salen and Zimmerman describe games from a multitude of
perspectives using examples of many games commissioned for the book. For
various historical reasons, it is tempting to choose between being theoretical
or practical, and while the present book is primarily theoretical, it is meant to
be at least compatible with practical work on games.
Fun in Theory
When we are theorizing about games, it can seem that games contain a builtin contradiction: Since play is normally assumed to be a free-form activity
devoid of constraints, it appears illogical that we would choose to limit our
options by playing games with fixed rules. Why be limited when we can be
free? The answer to this is basically that games provide context for actions:
moving an avatar is much more meaningful in a game environment than in
an empty space; throwing a ball has more interesting implications on the
playing field than off the playing field; a rush attack is only possible if there
are rules specifying how attacks work; winning the game requires that the
winning condition has been specified; without rules in chess, there are no
checkmates, end games, or Sicilian openings. The rules of a game add
meaning and enable actions by setting up differences between potential
moves and events.
Likewise, a game for multiple players is nominally a limitation of what
the players are allowed to do, but it is a limitation that provides an occasion
for interesting social interaction. When it is sometimes suggested to be a
problem that games are competitive, it is a basic misunderstanding of how a
game works: The conflict of a game is not antisocial; rather it provides a
context for human interaction. Controlling a character that hits a character
controlled by another player does not mean that one wants to attack that
other person in real life: It means that one enters a complex world of
symbolic interactions where attacking someone in a game can be an
invitation to friendship, and helping someone in the same game can be a
condescending rejection. In a game, things are not what they seem. Humans
are not always literal in their interactions, and we cannot take human games
at face value. Competitive games are social affairs, and much more so than
the rarely played non-competitive games that have been proposed.
Why are video games fun? One idea states that the all-important quality
factor of a game is its gameplay, the pure interactivity of the game. In other
words, that the quality of a game hinges on its rules, on the game-as-rules
rather than on the game-as-fiction. In the words of Sid Meier, designer of
Civilization and other classics, a game is a series of interesting choices
(Rollings and Morris 2000, 38), by which Meier means that high-quality
games are the ones whose choices provide high-quality mental challenges
for players. While this is a compelling idea, a closer examination reveals
many games that are considered enjoyable even though they do not provide
any mental challenges. I believe that there is ultimately no one-sentence
description of what makes all games fun; different games emphasize
different types of enjoyment and different players may even enjoy the same
game for entirely different reasons.
By analogy, James Cameron's movie Titanic (1997) contains a historical
element, the spectacle of a big ship crashing into an iceberg, political
commentary on class societies and gender roles, dramatic action where we
follow an escape from the ship as it sinks, a hit title song, and, of course, a
love story. Different viewers may enjoy the film for different reasons, and
one viewer may enjoy the action sequence while disliking the hit song, while
another viewer may like the love story and the hit song, but dislike the action
sequence. Part of the audience may simply be in the theater because the
people they were with wanted to go. Any popular cultural object or pastime
can be popular for several different reasons at the same time.
Fortunately, this does not prevent us from discussing game enjoyment in
more detail. The idea of what makes a game enjoyable may change over
time and things that were once considered dull obstacles to the player's
enjoyment can be foregrounded and become the central focus of a new
game. Arguing about the rules of a game is often considered a problem, but
it can also be enjoyable in its own right. Though a game generally maintains
some consistency in the kinds of challenges it presents to a player, it is also
possible to enjoy a game because the challenges it presents are inconsistent.
And even though games usually let players perform actions that they can not
perform in real life, it is, for example, possible to make a popular game like
The Sims (Maxis 2000) that involves mundane tasks such as cleaning a
house.
The Cultural Status of Games
Video games are notoriously considered lowbrow catalogues of geek and
adolescent male culture. While this is not the whole picture, there is some
extent to which the settings of many games can be somewhat unimaginative
and where the actions that the players can perform tend to be simple. Video
games generally focus on manipulating and moving objects, and less
commonly address the more complex interactions between humans such as
friendships, love, and deceit. We can suggest many reasons why this is so-we
can blame unimaginative game designers; we can blame a conservative
game audience; we can blame a risk-averse game industry; and finally we
can look at game design and see that the game form lends itself more easily
to some things than to others-it is hard to create a game about emotions
because emotions are hard to implement in rules.
While games are regularly considered lowbrow, this is often due to some
very naive notions of what is highbrow or what is art. In a very simple view
of art, art is what is ambiguous, whereas most games tend to have clear rules
and goals. As Immanuel Kant would have it, art is without inter est, whereas
game players clearly play with much interest and probably send the wrong
signals simply because they look completely unlike visitors to an art gallery.
We cannot reasonably use such claims as checklists, and we should avoid
thinking about art, and games, in a limited and unimaginative way.
It should also be clear that playing a game does not imply literally
endorsing the actions in the game or wanting to perform them in real life.
This book is not about violence in games, but followers of the discussion
may find it interesting to consider what a game is or what role the fictional
world of a game plays. There are certainly strong arguments in favor of
seeing the fictional worlds of games as just that, fiction. In a historical
perspective, the current preoccupation with the assumed dangers of video
games is a clear continuation of a long history of regulation of games as
such: For example, in 1457 golf was banned in Scotland because it was felt
that it kept young men from practicing archery (Avedon and SuttonSmith
1971, 24). Pinball machines were banned in New York City from the late
1930s to 1976 (Kent 2000, 72). The Australian Office of Film and Literature
Classification refused to classify Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar Games
2001), making it illegal to sell it in Australia (IGN.com 2001). Video games
were accused of being the reason for the Columbine high school shootings in
the United States (Jenkins 1999). Perhaps games have always had the
appearance of an uncontrollable activity with unclear and double meanings,
and this is why they continue to be targets of regulation.
I do not see any particular contradiction between enjoying an action game
and enjoying the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. There are a number of
historical reasons why we might be tempted to see these things as
incompatible, but they are basically misunderstandings. There is nothing
inherent in video games that prevents them from ultimately becoming and
being accepted as high art, even if this may take some time.
About This Book
The methods chosen in this book are intended to be non-exclusive. A method
can easily preclude other methods of investigations, but the present
investigation is meant to be at least compatible with empirical studies, game
design, sociology, film theory, and more. I have attempted to be open about
the status of different discussions and definitions, and I have tried to avoid
preference for any specific type of conclusion.
In addition to this introduction, the book has five parts.
Chapter 2 presents a classic game model; this model was inspired by a
number of previous writers on games. The model describes how games have
been constructed in a specific historical period, while allowing for the
possibility that video games have developed beyond this older model.
Chapter 3, on rules, attempts to combine a former understanding of game
rules with a focus on the experience of playing games. In order to describe
games as rule-based systems, I draw on computer science and the sciences of
complexity. To describe the player's use and experience of the rules of a
game, I draw on Marcel Danesi's writings on puzzles (2002), some game
design theory, and some cognitive science.
The goal of chapter 4, on fiction, is to provide an account of the fictional
aspect of games, an account that covers the spectrum from abstract games to
games with incoherent fictional worlds to games with detailed fictional
worlds. To be able to discuss this spectrum, the theory of fictional worlds is
employed.
Chapter 5, on rules and fiction, is the synthesis of the two perspectives of
rules and fiction and discusses their interactions using multiple examples.
Chapter 6 sums up the points of the book and provides some further
perspectives.
121
VIDEO GAMES AND THE CLASSIC GAME MODEL
The eight games in figures 2.1-2.8 look to be quite different: One might be
tempted to conclude that they have nothing in common and that their sharing
the term "games" is an insignificant linguistic coincidence. In the words of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "What is common to them all?-Don't say: `There must
be something common, or else they would not be all called "games"'-but
look and see whether there is anything common to all" ([1953] 2001, 27).
Indeed, this is the subject of this chapter. Building on seven game definitions
by previous writers, I create a new game definition that I call the classic
game model.' The model is classic in the sense that it is the way games have
traditionally been constructed. It is also a model that applies to at least a
5,000-year history of games. Although it is unusual to claim that any aspect
of human culture has remained unchanged for millennia, there are strong
arguments for this. In the introduction, I mentioned the Egyptian board game
of senet, which appears to be a precursor of contemporary games such as
backgammon and Parcheesi (Piccione 1980). Additionally, the board and
card games developed during the past few thousand years commonly have a
shared European-AfricanAsian history, and the American anthropologist
Stewart Culin has documented the games of the North American Indians
(Culin 1907). This means that games following the classic game model have
been known in the vast majority of human cultures.2 While many definitions
of games have been attempted, the one I will propose here has the goal of
explaining what relates video games to other games and what happens on the
borders of games. What should the definition look like? We are probably
interested in understanding the properties of the games themselves (the
artifact designed by the game developers), how the player interacts with
them, and what it means to be playing rather than, say, working. So let us
assume that a good definition should describe these three things: (1) the
system set up by the rules of a game, (2) the relation between the game and
the player of the game, and (3) the relation between the playing of the game
and the rest of the world.
Asteroids (Atari 1979).
Burger Time (Data East 1982).
Super Metroid (Nintendo 1993).
Counter-Strike (The Counter-Strike Team 2000).
I Figure 2.5 1
The Sims 2 (Maxis 2004).
I Figure 2.6 1
Super Monkey Ball 2 (Amusement Vision 2002).
I Figure 2.7 1
Grand Theft Auto 111(Rockstar Games 2001).
I Figure 2.8 1
Legend of Zelda: The Wind Woker (Nintendo 2003a).
As demonstrated by Bernard Suits (1978), the simplest way to test a game
definition is to test it for being either too broad or too narrow. To set up the
test before the definition, I will assume that Quake III Arena (ID Software
1999), Dance Dance Revolution (Konami 2001), checkers, chess, soccer,
tennis, and Hearts are games; that open-ended games such as The Sims
(Maxis 2000) and SimCity (Maxis 1989), gambling, and games of pure
chance are borderline cases; and that traffic, war, hypertext fiction, freeform
play, and ring-a-ring o' roses3 are not games. The definition should be able
to determine what falls inside from what falls outside the set of games, but
also to explain in detail why and how some things are on the border of the
definition. The existence of borderline cases is not a problem for the
definition as long as we are able to understand why and how something is a
borderline case.
In the big perspective, practically every single game found in any
compilation of traditional card games, board games, or sports falls squarely
within the classic game model I describe here. It appears that it is only
during the last third of the twentieth century that new game forms have
challenged the classic model.
Like the fact that mentioning the rules of a game can make it sound dull,
the idea of a definition may sound limiting but it is really the opposite. In
fact, to define games is to create what Douglas Hofstadter (1985) has termed
a productive set. An example of a productive set is the set of all shapes that
represent the letter A, where the mere description of the properties of the set
help show how the set can be expanded. Having described all possible A's
makes it much easier to come up with new typographical designs for the
letter A. Having a definition of games also points to how we can create new
kinds of "games" that try new things that games have not tried before. It is
easier to break the rules once you are aware of them.
The Language Issue
The first thing to note is that it may be easy to accept that there is a
difference as well as a close relation between play and game.4 Play is mostly
taken to be a free-form activity, whereas game is a rule-based activity. The
problem is that this distinction is very dependent on the language used, and
much confused by the fact that in French, Spanish, or German, neither jeux,
juego, or Spiel has such a distinction. In English, this is also a bit muddled
since "play" is both a noun and a verb (you play a game), whereas "game" is
mostly a noun. In English, it is common to see games as subset of play.
Scandinavian languages have a stronger distinction with leg = play and spil
= game with verbs for both-you can play play ("lege en leg") and game game
("spille et spil"), so to speak. When writing about games in Danish, it is
therefore not self-evident that games are a subset of play, whereas while
writing about Spiel in German, it is not obvious that one should distinguish
between games and play from the outset. This manifests itself with the
English translations of writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roger
Caillois who write in languages with no clear play/game distinctions.5 At the
same time, even within the English language, our focus is not on the letter
sequence g-a-m-e, since we probably consider big game hunting to be a
slightly different thing. To clarify, the focus here is on the set of games that
we can describe as rulebased games.
Some Previous Definitions
Let us go through some previous definitions of games, focus on their
similarities and point to any modifications or clarifications needed for our
current purpose. First, we should note that the definitions do not necessarily
try to describe the same aspect of games: Some concentrate purely on the
game as such, some on the activity of playing a game. Additionally, it turns
out that many things can be expressed in different ways. When one writer
talks about goals and another discusses conflict, it is possible to translate
between them: conflict entails (conflicting) goals; the notion of goals entails
the possibility of not reaching the goal, and thereby a conflict. We will get
back to this, but let us simply list seven game definitions, which we will
categorize afterward (table 2.1).
There are more similarities than differences in these definitions. If we
want to look at games on three different levels, we can sort the points of the
individual definitions according to what they describe. For example, "rules"
describes games as formal systems. That a game is "outside ordinary life"
describes the relationship between the game and the rest of the world. That a
game has an "object to be obtained" describes the game as a formal system
and the relationship between the player and the game. If we allow ourselves
to translate between different points, seeing for example "goals" and
"conflict" as different ways of expressing the same concept, we can group all
the points of the definitions according to the level(s) they describe: the game
as a formal system, the player and the game, and the game and the rest of the
world (table 2.2).6
Table 2.1
Seven game definitions
The definitions have many overlaps, but with some work, it is possible to
separate the actual disagreements from mere differences in wording.
Rules and Outcomes
All writers agree that games are rule-based (Crawford calls this a "formal
system"). While there are many things to say about rules (see chapter 3), let
us for the time being focus on the fact that rules are designed to be above
discussion-it is supposed to be clear whether a given action is or isn't
allowed by the rules of a game.
The question of outcomes is more interesting: It is a salient feature of
games that they have variable outcomes-if the outcome is the same every
time, it does not qualify as a game. The variability of the outcome follows
from Crawford's mention of conflict (only one side can succeed).
Salen and Zimmerman's contribution (2004) here is to point out that the
outcome of a game shares some features with the rules of the game: the
outcome of a game is quantifiable, meaning that it-like the rules-is designed
to be above discussion.
Goals and Conflict
Only Bernhard Suits talks explicitly about goals (a specific state of affairs to
be brought about) but goals are implicit in Salen and Zimmerman and
Crawford's conflict-a conflict presupposes mutually contradicting goals
between two entities or, in a broader sense, between a player and the
difficulty of reaching a goal. As we will see later, a game without a goal is a
borderline case.
Voluntary
Roger Caillois claims that games are voluntary. The problem is that it is
quite unclear what this means. Is it not a game if social pressure forces the
player to play? Because human motivation is too complex to be simply
explained in terms of its being voluntary/involuntary, I believe that it is not
possible to meaningfully describe whether games are voluntary or not.
However, it could be said that games are primarily autotelic; that is, they are
mostly used for their own sake rather than for an external purpose. It is very
hard to set this up as a clear criterion-the game definition I am proposing at
least partly explains why games are such that this issue cannot be settled.
Table 2.2
Game definitions compared
Separate and Unproductive
In Johan Huizinga's description, play is an activity that has "no material
interest, and no profit can be gained from it" (1950, 13). Roger Caillois
points out that this leaves no place for gambling and suggests that in games,
"Property is exchanged, but no goods are produced" (1961, 5).
Both Huizinga and Caillois describe games as being outside "normal" life:
They are assigned a separate space and separate time. In Huizinga's
description, games take place inside a magic circle, outside which the game
does not apply. There are some obvious objections and counterexamples to
this description-I will return to this.
Less Efficient Means
Bernard Suits famously describes games as permitting players to use only
the "less efficient means" in order to reach the goal (Suits 1978, 34). 1 will
contend that this description is interesting but ultimately misleading. Suits's
argument hinges on the fact that it is (mostly) possible to describe a game as
the effort to reach what he calls a pre-lusory goal, a goal which can be said
to exist independently of the game, and that there is always an optimal but
disallowed way of reaching this goal. This idea is in itself quite problematic.'
The concept of inefficient means makes sense in Suits's prime examples of
the race where it is not allowed to cut across the infield and the high jump
where using a ladder is disallowed. The problem is that it would always be
possible to set up a game using the most efficient means possible: a racing
game where cutting over the infield was allowed; a race to climb a ladder,
etc. And the concept of less efficient means completely breaks down in the
case of video games. In FIFA 2002 (a soccer game) (Electronic Arts 2002)
and Virtua Tennis (Hitmaker 2000), the video games are much easier to
master than their real-life professional counterparts are-namely, soccer and
tennis. If we look at any video game, how can we say that the player is using
less efficient means? Would this be compared to making the game yourself?
Hacking the game? Using a cheat code?
Bernard Suits's definition is exemplary in that it shows how a feature of a
definition can be alluring, in this case not because "less efficient means" is
actually part of what makes a game a game, but because it entails some other
features that are important, namely some player effort, some kind of
separation of the game from the rest of the world, and some element of
acceptance of the rules-in a way, Suits hints at the characteristic of games
being voluntary.
Fiction
As already discussed, the issue of fiction depends much on the games
discussed. Some games have a fictional element, but this is not universal to
games. I discuss fiction in chapter 4 of this book.
Social Groupings
Since some games are solitary, social groupings are not a universal aspect of
games, but game rules and social groupings interplay-a group may form
around the playing of a specific game, and an existing group may decide to
play a game. The way a game can build community is discussed in chapter 3.
The Game and the Player: A Second Look at Goals
The list of examples gives us two border case examples of the concept of
goals: The Sims and Sim.City are often labeled games even though they do
not have explicit goals. While the game designer, Will Wright, claims that
they are not games but toys (Costikyan 1994), they are nevertheless often
categorized as "video games." The proposal here is to be more explicit about
the player's relation to the game by dividing the concept of goals into three
distinct components, namely:
1. Valorization of the possible outcomes: Some outcomes are described as
positive, some as negative.
2. Player effort: The player has to do something.
3. Attachment of the player to an aspect of the outcome: The player agrees to
be happy if he or she wins the game, unhappy if he or she loses.
Separate and Unproductive: Negotiable Consequences
In Roger Caillois's definition, games are separate in time and space from the
rest of the world and unproductive. It is fairly easy to find examples of
games that transgress the first aspect: It is after all possible to play chess by
mail, in which case the game overlaps with daily life, both in the sense that
the time span of the game overlaps a non-game part of life and in the sense
that it is possible to consider the moves one wants to play while going about
one's daily business. Likewise, many Internet-based strategy games stretch
over months or even years. The second feature, unproductive, is dubious if
productivity can mean something other than the production of physical
goods. Caillois's suggestion is that gambling does not produce anything.
From an economic viewpoint, this is problematic since gambling is a huge
industry. Also note that it is possible to bet on the outcome of any game,8
and that many people do make a living playing games.
Separation is a special issue in live action role-playing games (games
where players typically dress up as characters to play the game), where the
games may be played in spaces also used for "normal life." In these cases,
specific descriptions have to be made as to what interactions are allowed
between non-playing people and players.9
Taking a step back, we can see that the notions of games being separate
and unproductive are quite similar in two respects. Both specify what
interactions are possible (and allowed) between the game activity and the
rest of the world, and neither are perfect boundaries, but rather fuzzy areas
under constant negotiation.
When Caillois claims that a game played involuntarily is not a game,
there is a distinction between a given game and a given playing of a game.
All copies of a given title do not suddenly cease to be games because
someone is making money playing them. Since all games are potential
targets for betting and professional playing, I suggest that games are
characterized as activities with negotiable consequences. A specific playing
of a game may have assigned consequences, but games are characterized by
the fact that they can be assigned consequences on a per-play basis. That
games carry a degree of separation from the rest of the world is entailed in
their consequences being negotiable.
A New Definition: Six Game Features
From this, the game definition I propose has six features:
1. Rules: Games are rule-based.
2. Variable, quantifiable outcome: Games have variable, quantifiable
outcomes.
3. Valorization of outcome: The different potential outcomes of the game are
assigned different values, some positive and some negative.
4. Player effort: The player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome.
(Games are challenging.)
5. Player attached to outcome: The player is emotionally attached to the
outcome of the game in the sense that a player will be winner and "happy"
in case of a positive outcome, but a loser and "unhappy" in case of a
negative outcome.
6. Negotiable consequences: The same game [set of rules] can be played
with or without real-life consequences.
In short form:
A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome,
where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts
effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally
attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable.
Table 2.3
The classic game model and the game, the player, the world
In diagram form, the new definition can be visualized as six features,
spanning the three categories of the game, the player, and the world (table
2.3). Features 1, 2, and 4 describe the properties of the game as a formal
system; 3 describes the values assigned to the possible outcomes of the
system-the goal that the player must strive for; 4 and 5 describe the relation
between the system and the player (feature 4 describes both the fact that the
game system can be influenced by player input and that the player does
something); 6 describes the relation between the game activity and the rest
of the world. Each of these features can be elaborated.
1. Rides
Games have rules. The rules of games have to be sufficiently well defined
that they can be either programmed on a computer or that players do not
have to argue about them every time they play. The playing of a nonelectronic game is an activity that in itself involves trying to remove any
lack of clarity in the game rules: If there is disagreement about the rules of a
game, the game must be paused until the disagreement has been solved. In a
commercial non-electronic game, the developer will (hopefully) have made
sure that the rules are unambiguous, but what about non-commercial games?
A non-electronic and "folk" (non-commercial) game tends to drift toward
becoming unambiguous. This explains some of the affinity between games
and computers-and the fact that a several thousand-year-old non-electronic
game is easily implementable in a computer program: The drive toward
definiteness in the rules makes the game ripe for implementation in a
programming language.
The rules of any given game can be compared to a piece of software that
then needs hardware to actually be played. In the case of games, the
hardware can be a computer, mechanical devices, the laws of physics, or
even the human brain.
Even if the rules are unambiguous, the game activity still requires that the
players respect the rules. Bernard Suits has described this as lusory attitude
(1978, 38-40)-the player accepts the rules because they make the game
activity possible. Even a cheater depends on the rules to be able to play.
2. Variable, Quantifiable Outcome
For something to work as a game, the rules of the game must provide
different possible outcomes. This is straightforward, but for a game to work
as a game activity, the game must also match the skill of the player(s).
Consider the game of tic-tac-toe in figure 2.9.
This is a general property of tic-tac-toe: if your opponent begins by
placing a piece in the middle, you must always place your first piece in the
corner, otherwise you will lose to a reasonably intelligent opponent. This
explains why tic-tac-toe is a children's game, and this is where we find that
there is a subjective aspect to games. Tic-tac-toe remains interesting as long
as it is mentally challenging, but once the players figure out a perfect
strategy, they will achieve a draw every time they play. Variable outcome
therefore depends on who plays the game. If players always achieve a draw
or if a master player continually wins against a beginner, it is still a game,
but the players are unable to use it as a game activity.
Many games have features for ensuring a variable outcome. Go, golf, or
fighting games like Tekken 3 Tag Tournament (Namco 2000), allow for
handicaps for the players in order to even out skill differences. A few racing
games cheat to even out the skill differences between players: In Gran
Turismo 3: A-Spec (Polyphony Digital 2001), players who are trailing be
hind on the racetrack automatically drive faster than the leading players,
allowing them to catch up.
A game of tic-tac-toe.
Likewise, players themselves may feign ineptitude in order to bring some
uncertainty to the outcome-the Tekken 3 player may play slightly unfocused;
the race game player may simply drive slowly or even reverse the car, the
chess player may try especially daring strategies. We may term this playerorganized criticality-in the same way that players try to uphold the rules,
players may also try to ensure suspense about the outcome of the game.
Finally, quantifiable outcome means that the outcome of a game is
designed to be beyond discussion, meaning that the goal of Pac-Man
(Namco 1980) is to get a high score, rather than to "move in a pretty way.i10
Since playing a game where the participants disagree about the outcome is
rather problematic, the specification of the outcome develops like the rules
of a game, toward becoming unambiguous.
3. Valorization of Outcome
Valorization means that some of the possible outcomes of the game are
better than others. In a multiplayer game, the individual players are usually
assigned conflicting positive outcomes (this is what creates the conflict in a
game).
The values of the different outcomes of the game can be assigned in
different ways: by a statement on the box ("Defend the Earth"); by
instructions of the game; by the fact that some actions give a higher score
than others; by virtue of there being only one way of progressing and
making something happen; or it can be implicit from the setup-being
attacked by hostile monsters usually means that the player has to defend
himself or herself against them.
Positive outcomes are usually harder to reach than negative outcomes-this
is what makes a game challenging. A game where it is easier to reach the
positive outcome than to not reach it would likely not be played much.
4. Player Effort
Player effort is another way of stating that games are challenging, or that
games contain a conflict. It is a part of the rules of most games (except in
games of pure chance) that the players' actions can influence the state of the
game and the game's outcome. The investment of player effort tends to lead
to an attachment of the player to the outcome, since the investment of energy
into the game makes the player (partly) responsible for the outcome. The
challenge of games and the player's effort are examined in chapter 3.
5. Player Attached to Outcome
The emotional attachment of the player to the outcome is a psychological
feature of the game activity. A player may feel genuinely happy if he or she
wins, and unhappy if he or she loses. Curiously, this is not just related to
player effort: a player may still feel happy when winning a game of pure
chance. As such, attachment of the player to the outcome is a less formal
category than the previous ones in that it depends on the player's attitude
toward the game. The spoilsport is one who refuses to seek enjoyment in
winning, or refuses to become unhappy by losing.
6. Negotiable Consequences
A game is characterized by the fact that it can optionally be assigned reallife
consequences. The actual assignment can be negotiated on a play-byplay,
location-by-location, and person-to-person basis. So while it is possible to
bet on the outcome of any normally "for-fun" game, it is impossible to enter
a casino in Las Vegas and play without betting money.
If a player loses a game and faces horrible consequences from this,
conforming to the negotiated outcome is then a question of honor. In the
work Germania, the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. AD 56-ca. AD 120) is
surprised at how absolutely the Germanic people respect this: "Gambling,
one may be surprised to find, they practise in all seriousness in their sober
hours, with such recklessness in winning or losing that, when all else has
failed, they stake personal liberty on the last and final throw: the loser faces
voluntary slavery: though he be the younger and stronger man, he suffers
himself to be bound and sold" (Tacitus [AD 98] 1914, 297-299).
There is an important difference between the actual operations of the
game and the outcome of the game. The only way for a game to have
negotiable consequences is if the operations and moves needed to play the
game are mostly harmless. Any game involving actual weapons has strong
non-negotiable consequences. This is in itself a point of contention, since
many sports can lead to injury and even death. Arguably, part of the
fascination with some sports such as boxing or motor sports lies in the fact
that they are dangerous. Nevertheless, it is a convention of these games that
injuries are to be avoided. Public outrage is likely if a motor sports event has
poor security precautions.
The consequences of a game have a special status in that they are under
continued negotiation, probably both in general societal termswhat is
permissible for any game-and on a per-game basis, where the participants
may openly or implicitly discuss the range of permissible reactions that the
game can elicit.
Even so, all games have some officially sanctioned non-optional
consequences, namely in that they may take the time and energy of the
players and, more prominently, as described in point 5, that games can make
the players happy or unhappy, hurt or boost their pride. But, again, this can
happen only within certain negotiable limits, since there are several well
known transgressions, such as excessive sulking (being a poor loser),
excessive boasting, or leaving the game prematurely if one is losing. The
amount of permissible teasing and provoking of other players is not set in
stone; there is a continuous breaking of ideals: Friendships may end over
negotiations in Monopoly (Parker Brothers 1936), or players may get angry
that their loved ones did not protect them in a game of CounterStrike (The
Counter-Strike Team 2000). However, ideally in game playing, this should
not occur. The explicitly negotiated consequences concern what the players
can consciously control, such as the exchange of goods or money, but the
involuntary and less controllable reactions such as joy or sorrow are less
clearly defined.
Since much of human interaction is symbolic rather than physical, this
raises a question about the boundaries between games and non-games. For
example, for any given country, we could in theory take the complete set of
regulations regarding parliamentary elections and perform them as games in
which contestants would perform actual rallies and speeches in order to
make the public vote for the contestant who might then receive a cash prize
rather than public office. This sounds much like a game and, in fact, it would
be. Elections are not games since the consequences of the outcome are
defined and not subject to negotiation, but the rules governing the execution
of the election are potentially usable for game purposes. Many human
activities can in principle be performed as games. Examples could include
politics, courtship, and academia. Note that these are activities that are
occasionally metaphorically described as being "games": the game of
politics, the game of love, the game of getting tenure at universities.
Professional sports is a special case. According to Roger Caillois, the
professional player or athlete is working rather than playing (1961, 6). This
quickly becomes counterintuitive since a contest such as a marathon may
include professional athletes as well as amateurs who are running "for the
fun of it." This logically means that the marathon is and is not a game at the
same time. A better explanation is that even professional players are playing
a game, but that in this specific game session, the consequences have been
negotiated to be financial and career-determining. Perhaps the reason it can
be discussed whether professional sports are games or not is that we
associate a game with the context in which it usually appears; that is, we
tend to not think of something as a game if we have only seen it performed
with serious consequences. So, even though the rules governing the stock
market or elections could be used for game purposes, we do not consider
them games, and even though soccer is played professionally, we consider it
a game because it is also played in non-professional settings and we are
aware that its consequences are negotiable.
On the Borders of Games
In diagram form, we can visualize the game model as two concentric circles,
where things considered games have all six previously defined features and
therefore belong within the inner circle; borderline cases can be placed
between the two circles; and decidedly non-game cases are placed outside
the outer circle (figure 2.10).
If we begin with the borderline cases: pen and paper role-playing games
are not classic games because, having a human game master, their rules are
not fixed beyond discussion." Open-ended simulations like SirnCity are not
classic games since they have no explicit goals-that is, no explicit values are
assigned to the possible outcomes of the game, but what happens in the
game is still attached to the player and the player invests effort in playing the
game.
Outside the set of games, free-form play has variable rules; structured
play like ring-a-ring o' roses has fixed rules but also fixed outcome.
Storytelling has fixed outcome, the player does not exert effort in order to
influence the outcome, and the player is not personally attached to the
outcome. Watching Conway's game of life or watching a fireplace is to
experience a system with rules and outcomes, but there are no values
assigned to the outcomes, the player is not attached to the outcome, and no
player effort is required.
Traffic shares most of the game features, namely rules (traffic laws),
variable outcome (you either arrive or you do not arrive safely), value
attached to outcome (arriving safely is better), player effort, and players
attached to the outcome (you actually arrive or do not), but the consequences
of traffic are not optional-moving in traffic always has real-life
consequences. The same applies to the concept of noble war such as war
waged respecting the Geneva Convention.
Games as Objects and Games as Activities
Even with this definition, "game" can mean two things: A static object or
artifact or an activity or event that players perform. Chess is a game (a static
object), but we can also play a game of chess (an activity).
On the borders of the classic game model.
According to this game definition, the game as an object is a list of rules
with the property that a computer or a group of players can implement
unambiguously: the rules must-if implemented-produce variable and
quantifiable outcomes and describe how the player(s) can exert effort. The
game must provide a description of which outcomes are positive and which
are negative. The game must explicitly or by convention signal to players
that it is an activity with an outcome to which they should feel emotionally
attached. Finally, the activity that the game describes must have
consequences that are negotiable.
As an activity, a game is a system that changes state according to a set of
rules that are implemented by humans, computers, or natural laws. The game
is such that its outcome is undetermined, variable, and quantifiable. The
players are aware that some outcomes are more desirable than others. The
players are able to exert effort in order to influence the outcome. The players
feel attached to the eventual outcome. Finally, the consequences of the game
have been negotiated, ideally before the beginning of the game.
In practice, this distinction is mostly straightforward. Concepts such as
rules and state machines statically describe dynamic objects. The more
difficult distinctions concern the psychological aspects of games. It is
possible to take anything with rules, variable outcomes, player effort, and
negotiable consequences and turn it into a game by simply assigning values
to the outcomes between players. For example, two people walking down
the street can decide to turn it into a race by describing it as better to reach
the destination first. A single person performing a mundane task such as
sweeping the floor can decide to make it into a game by timing him or
herself, trying to beat a personal record. Drawing on a piece of paper can be
assigned simple rules and turned into a game. This can then become a
convention-the two people who originally raced down the street can for a
time permanently agree to race when turning a specific corner. The activity
of doodling according to rules may feel sufficiently entertaining that the
players tell others of their doodling game. Most of the things described as
games are sufficiently well defined that they can be played again. This
indicates that there is a loose idea that games are repeatable. When we speak
of a specific game, we generally speak of it as being a repeatable event.
Salen and Zimmerman explicitly write that "rules are repeatable" (2004,
139).
Game Examples
The game model does not mean that all games are the same, but it provides a
way of describing what distinguishes different games from each other. The
game model is implemented differently in various games:
Checkers
Let us look at an example game, checkers (or draughts):
1. Rules: In short form, the rules state that two players, white and black,
each have twelve pieces that can move diagonally across the board, jump
over opponent pieces and capture them.
2. Outcome: Defined as one player having lost all his or her pieces.
3. Value: Better to be the one with pieces left.
4. Effort: Consider moves.
5. Attachment: You win.
6. Negotiable consequences: Generally, a harmless pastime, but it is possible
to play for money. Tournaments exist.
Soccer
1. Rules: Two teams with eleven players each, one of whom is a goalkeeper.
Each team has a goal, which are at opposite ends of the playing field.
Players can kick the ball but not touch it with their hands (goalkeepers can
touch it with their hands). If the ball leaves the boundary of the playing
field, the ball is given to the opposite team of the team that last touched it.
Putting a ball in the opponent's goal scores a point. The game takes place
within two halves of 45 minutes each.
2. Outcome: Defined as the goals scored within the time allotted to a game.
3. Value: The team with most goals wins.
4. Effort: Moving about, strategies, tactics, general skill in handling of the
ball, communication.
5. Attachment: Team wins; the individual player can be informally judged on
the basis of his or her achievements in the game.
6. Negotiable consequences: Social consequences in doing well for the team
versus doing badly. Injuries non-negotiable; there are many professional
leagues; betting is common.
Battlefield 1942
This refers to the "Conquest" game mode of Battlefield 1942 (Digital
Illusions 2002).
1. Rules: Two teams play against each other. There are rules regarding the
movement of players, weapons, vehicles, level design, counting of points
for having taken a base, respawning, etc. Some rules are explicit (counting
of points); some rules are likely to be inferred by the player from the
environment (guns kill); some rules, such as the way in which vehicles
handle, have to be learned by the players.
2. Outcome: Defined as the accumulated time important locations on the
map were held.
3. Value: More points (for time locations were held) win. Potentially one
team can kill more players than the other team, but still lose the game.
4. Effort: Moving, shooting, strategies, communication.
5. Attachment: Team wins.
6. Negotiable consequences: Harmless, but some tournaments are being
played. Social consequences in doing well for the team versus doing badly.
Borderline Case: SimCity
As previously mentioned, Sim.City is considered a borderline case.
1. Rules: Rules regarding economy, buildings, assumptions about how the
city works, transport. Some rules are explicit, some are inferred by the
player from the setting, some contradict the setting-a power plant can be
built in a few months in the game, unlike in real life.
2. Outcome: Few specified outcomes.
3. Value assigned to outcome: No outcomes are assigned values, though the
player may feel that building a city is better than not building one, but the
game conversely accommodates players who want to destroy their
creations. Players may assign their own personal values to the different
outcomes.
4. Effort: Building, planning.
5. Attachment: Whatever happens is to some extent the players fault, but this
is loosely defined.
6. Consequences: Not a prime candidate for betting since the outcome is not
clearly defined.
Transmedial Games
The definition of games proposed here does not tie games to any specific
medium'2 or any specific set of tools or objects. Furthermore, we know that
many games actually move between media: card games are played on
computers, sports continue to be a popular video game genre, and video
games occasionally become board games. Since this has not, to my
knowledge, been explored in any systematic way, we can take a cue from
narratology: stories cannot be examined independently but only through a
medium such as oral storytelling, novels, and movies. Seymour Chatman has
argued that narratives exist since they can be translated from one medium to
another. "This transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing
that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium" (1978, 20).
While it is clear that stories can be passed between a novel and a movie and
back, it is also clear that not everything passes equally well. For example,
novels are strong in creating inner voices and thoughts, while movies are
better at conveying movement.
We can view games from a similar perspective: While there is no single
medium or set of props that is the ideal game medium, games do exist, and
do contain recognizable features, whether as card games, board games, video
games, sports, or even mind games. There is no set of equipment or material
support common to all games. What is common, however, is a specific sort
of immaterial support, namely the upholding of the rules, the determination
of what moves and actions are permissible and what they will lead to.
Upholding the rules is in actuality provided by human beings (in board
games or card games), computers, or physical laws (in sports).
The card game hearts can be transferred to a computer because the
computer can uphold and compute the rules that would normally be upheld
by humans, and because the computer has the memory capacity to remember
the game state. The adaptation of board and card games to computers is
possible due to the fact that computers are capable of performing the
operations defined in the rules of the games, operations that are normally
performed by humans, as well as keeping track of the game state, something
normally done by using cards and board pieces. What we have is therefore
an ecology of game media that support games, but do so differently. Thus
games can move between different media-sometimes with ease, sometimes
with great difficulty.
Chess qualifies as one of the most broadly implemented games, since
chess is available as a board game, on computers, and even played blind,
where the players keep track of the game state in their head. Sports are
somewhat special in that the properties of the individual human body are
part of the game state. This means that the rules of sports are less clearly
defined than the rules of other games (hence the need for a referee). It is very
hard to realistically implement the physics of something like pool, soccer, or
bowling in video games. At the time of writing, there are several companies
(e.g., Havok and Mathengine) dedicated exclusively to providing simulation
of physics in video games.
Game Implementations and Game Adaptations
There are big differences in the ways that games move between media. Card
games on computers should be considered implementations since it is
possible to unambiguously map one-to-one correspondences between all the
possible game states in the computer version and in the physical card game.
Sports games on computers are better described as adaptations, since much
detail is lost in the physics model of the computer program because it is a
simplification of the real world, and in the interface because the video game
player's body is not part of the game state. Adapting soccer to computers is
therefore a highly selective adaptation. Game media support games in two
distinct ways:
1. Computation: how the game medium upholds the rules and decides what
happens in response to player input.
2. Game state: how the game medium keeps track of the current game state.
The distinction between computation and game state is necessary in order to
explain the differences between some of the game media mentioned here
(table 2.4). In technical terms, it corresponds to the low-level distinction in
the computer between CPU (computation) and the RAM (memory).
• Generally speaking, video games are a superset of board games and card
games; most card and board games are immediately implementable in
computer programs. The physical setting around the game does not
translate well.
Table 2.4
Games moving between media
• Board games implemented on computers include Axis & Allies (Hasbro
Interactive 1998), Risk (BlueSky Software 1997), chess, checkers, and
backgammon.
• The feasibility of adaptation from video game to board or card game
depends on the game. In the 1980s, many popular arcade games were used
for selling poor quality board games: this befell (among others) Pac-Man
(Milton Bradley 1982), Berzerk (Milton Bradley 1983), and Frogger
(Milton Bradley 1981).
• One of the most popular adaptations is from sports to video games. These
adaptations are imperfect due to both lack of fidelity in the physics
simulations and the low amount of information that the player can input,
but they are also extremely popular, probably because they allow players
to imagine that they are doing something they could not normally do.13
• Video game to sport adaptations are almost nonexistent. A notable
exception is that some players of paintball games have adopted the rules of
Counter-Strike.
• Card decks are good at keeping track of possessions, and resources and at
hiding information.
• Board games provide possessions and spatial gameplay well, but are most
immediately suited to games of perfect information (where all players have
access to all information in the game). This is easily implemented on
computers.
• Dance and rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution (Konami 2001) are
special in that the amount of information transferred between the player
and the game state is very low, but the body is nevertheless heavily
involved since the physical layout of the dance mat requires you to move
your body in order to play.
• Sports allow for many things that video games cannot, mostly because of
the importance of bodily capabilities in the world and the depth of the
"interface." More information is transferred to the game state-in fact, the
player's body is part of the game state.
Game Implementations: Mapping between Domains
The distinction between an implementation and an adaptation concerns
whether there is an unambiguous correspondence between the possible game
states in the two game versions. Nevertheless, two games that appear
completely unrelated can turn out to be equivalent on a game state to game
state basis. For example, a spatial game may be converted into a non-spatial
game.14 Consider the following game:
Two players take turns picking a number between 1 and 9. Each number can
only be picked once. The first player to have 3 numbers that add up to 15 has
won. If all numbers are picked without a winner, the game is drawn.15
As an example game between player A and player B:
1. A picks 5.
2. B picks 9.
3. A picks 2.
4. B has no choice but to pick 8 (otherwise, A could get 5+2+8=15).
5. A picks 7, and thereby threatens to win by either picking 3 (5+7+3=15) or
6 (2+7+6=15).
6. At this point, B has lost because the first pick (9) was a mistake.
If this sequence seems familiar, it is because it can be completely mapped to
the example game of tic-tac-toe earlier in this chapter: If we lay out the
numbers 1 to 9 in a 3 x 3 grid, the game is an implementation of tic-tactoe
(figure 2.11).
Picking the numbers 6, 7, and 2 is therefore identical to placing three
pieces in the rightmost column; if your opponent has picked 5 and 2, it is a
good idea to pick 8 in order to prevent him or her from getting a sum of 15.
This works because the numbers above are laid out in a magic square where
the sum of each vertical, horizontal, and diagonal line adds up to 15. (For the
history of magic squares, see Danesi 2002, 147-151.) Compare the two
games (figure 2.12).
Tic-tac-toe as a mathematical game: Pick three numbers
that add up to 15.
This mathematical game is equivalent to tic-tac-toe in the sense that there
is an unambiguous mapping between every possible position in tictac-toe
and every possible position of the mathematical game. The two games are,
however, probably not experienced identically by playersin tic-tac-toe,
players will think of the game as a spatial problem; in the mathematical
game, players will think of the game as a game of adding numbers.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that most players find tic-tac-toe much easier.
This means that games that are formally equivalent can be experienced
completely differently.
The Limits of the Classic Game Model
While some writers have claimed that games are forever indefinable or
ungraspable, a review of David Parlett's two books The Oxford History of
Board Games (1999) and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Card Games (2000)
indicates that all of the hundreds of games described fall within the classic
game model. The vast majority of things called "games" are found in the
intersection of the six features of the game model. It is an intersection that
can be traced historically for at least a few thousand years and through most
human cultures.
Why is there an affinity between computers and games? Because games
are a transmedial phenomenon, and the material support needed to play a
game (like the projector and the screen in cinema) is immaterial, since
games are not tied to a specific set of material devices, but to the processing
of rules. This fits computers well because the well defined character of game
rules means that they can be implemented on computers.
Equivalence between tic-tac-toe and a mathematical game.
The classic game model is no longer all there is to games. With the
appearance of role-playing games, where a game can have rules interpreted
by a game master, and with the appearance of video games, the game model
is being modified in many ways.
1. Rules: While video games are just as rule-based as other games, they
modify the classic game model in that it is now the computer that upholds
the rules. This gives video games much flexibility, allowing for rules more
complex than humans can handle; freeing the player(s) from having to
enforce the rules; and allowing for games where the player does not know
the rules from the outset.
2. Variable outcome: In many cases, the computer can act as a referee in
order to determine the outcome of a game on the basis of events that would
not be immediately discernible to a human.
In persistent online games, the player never reaches a final outcome but
only a temporary one when logging out of the game.
3. Valorization of outcome: Open-ended simulation games such as The
Sims change the basic game model by removing the goals, or more
specifically, by not describing some possible outcome as better than others.
4. Player effort: The non-physical nature of video games means that
player effort can work in new ways. For example, the player can control a
large number of automatic units in a real-time strategy game, which would
not be possible in a non-electronic game.
5. Attachment to outcome: Because an open-ended simulation game does
not have a specific win or lose state, it gives the player a less well defined
relation to the game outcome.
6. Negotiable consequences: It is perhaps implicit in the classic game
model that a game is bounded in time and space; the game has a specific
duration and a specific location. Pervasive games, location-based games, and
some live-action role-playing games break this, as do games such as
Majestic (Anim-X 2001) where actual phone calls are part of the playing of
the game.
Let us consider what the classic game model does: It provides a barebones
description of the field of games; it explains why computers and games work
well together; it explains why games are transmedial; and it points to some
recent developments in games. The game model by itself does not provide
much explanation of the variations between games, or of why games are
enjoyable. It is an abstract platform upon which games are built, a platform
that games use in different ways.
Games do have something in common; we can talk about the borders
between games and what is not a game-video games are the latest
development in a history of games that spans millennia.
131
RULES
Game rules are paradoxical: Rules and enjoyment may sound like quite
different things, but rules are the most consistent source of player enjoyment
in games. We may associate rules with being barred from doing something
we really want, but in games, we voluntarily submit to rules. Game rules are
designed to be easy to learn, to work without requiring any ingenuity from
the players, but they also provide challenges that require ingenuity to
overcome. Finally, the rules of a game tend to add up to more than the sum
of their parts: For most games, the strategies needed to play are more
complex than the rules themselves.
Fixed rules are a core feature of games, but rules do not appear out of
nowhere; they are created by players in folk games and by game designers in
commercial games. Many games are played using either playing cards or
computers, but the rules appear to be the same, even if it is the players that
uphold the rules when played with cards, but the computer that upholds the
rules in the video game version. As a game can move between different
media, so can the rules that make up the game. But then what are rules made
of and what function do game rules serve?
Let us assume that games are enjoyable in part because players enjoy the
sense of accomplishment that solving a challenge gives them. In a
multiplayer game, the enjoyment may also come from the interaction with
other players, the contest or the teamwork involved in playing the game.
These are not the only enjoyable aspects of games, but they are surely
among the most universal ones.
In short, rules work like this.
1. Rules are designed to be above discussion in the sense that a specific
rule should be sufficiently clear that players can agree about how to use it.
Rules describe what players can and cannot do, and what should happen in
response to player actions. Rules should be implementable without any
ingenuity.
2. The rules of the game construct a state machine, a "machine" that
responds to player action (regardless of whether the game is played using
computer power or not).
3. The state machine of the game can be visualized as a landscape of
possibilities or a branching game tree of possibilities from moment to
moment during the playing of the game. To play a game is to interact with
the state machine and to explore the game tree.
4. Since a game has multiple outcomes, the player must expend effort
trying to reach as positive an outcome as possible. It is usually harder to
reach a positive outcome than a negative one-harder to win than to lose. If
the player works toward the positive outcome, the player therefore faces a
challenge.
5. The way the game is actually played when the player tries to overcome
its challenges is its gameplay. The gameplay is an interaction between the
rules and the player's attempt at playing the game as well as possible.
6. Games are learning experiences, where the player improves his or her
skills at playing the game. At any given point, the player will have a specific
repertoire of skills and methods for overcoming the challenges of the game.
Part of the attraction of a good game is that it continually challenges and
makes new demands on the player's repertoire.
7. Any specific game can be more or less challenging, emphasize specific
types of challenges, or even serve as a pretext for a social event. This is a
way in which rules can give players enjoyable experiences, and different
games can give different experiences.
There are two extreme ways of creating challenges for players: that of
emergence (rules combining to provide variation) and progression
(challenges presented serially by way of special-case rules). Emergence
games are the historically dominant game form. Progression games are a
historically new game form where the game designer explicitly determines
the possible ways in which the game can progress. Rules in games of
emergence present a paradox contained in the sentence easy to learn but
difficult to master. This is a common description of the type of game with
nominally simple rules where it nevertheless requires immense amounts of
effort to gain proficiency in playing the game. The apparent paradox here is
that the simplicity of the rules of a game may lead to very complex
gameplay. Emergence in games comes in many different forms, and it
explains many interesting aspects of games such as the fact that a game can
be played for hundreds of years without being exhausted; how the actual
playing of a game can be unpredictable even to its designer. The element of
surprise in emergent games is special in that it is an interaction between the
rules of the game and the fuzzy ways in which humans understand games.
What makes an enjoyable challenge? Using a combination of Marcel
Danesi's discussion of puzzles (2002) and discussions from the game
development community about what Sid Meier has coined interesting
choices (Rollings and Morris 2000, 38) I will examine what kinds of
challenges games provide and how. Rules are not the only source of game
enjoyment; I discuss the enjoyment of games as fictional worlds in chapter
4.
What Are Rules?
There is generally a clear-cut split between the fiction and rules of a game:
The rules of chess govern the movement of the pieces; the representation
fiction of chess is the shape and color of the pieces. No matter how the
pieces are shaped, the rules, gameplay, and strategies remain identical.
What are rules? One school of thought describes rules as primarily being
limitations. In the previous chapter, I rejected Bernard Suits's definition of
games as being based on allowing the player to reach a goal by only using
the less efficient means available (1978, 34). In Suits's view, games limit the
options of a player: in high jump, using a ladder is disallowed; in a track
race, the player may not run across the midfield. My objection was that it
made some sense in the choice of examples, but that it is not a general
feature of games. In sports, we generally have the option of finding a more
efficient way of reaching the game goal. On a basic level, this is because the
human body and the laws of physics exist before the game, but in a game,
they are appropriated for the game's purposes, and some limitations are
added to how they can be used. This is similar to my racing game mentioned
in the preface, where the movement of the cursor on a terminal was an
existing system that was used to signify the movement of a car; the game
then imposed additional rules on that system, disallowing the movement of
the cursor into the characters that signified the racetrack. Likewise, Katie
Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe rules as limiting player action with the
following argument: "Rules limit player action. The chief way that rules
operate is to limit the activities of the player. If you are playing the game
Yatzee, think of all the things you could do with the dice in that game: you
could light them on fire, eat them, juggle them, or make jewelry out of
them.... Rules are `sets of instructions,' and following those instructions
means doing what the rules require and not doing something else instead"
(2004, 122). This is technically true, but the limitation view of rules only
paints half the picture: you could make jewelry of the dice, but it would be
meaningless within the Yatzee game. The rules of a game also set up
potential actions, actions that are meaningful inside the game but
meaningless outside. It is the rules of chess that allow the player to perform
a checkmate-without the rules, there is no checkmate, only meaningless
moving of pieces across a board. Rules specify limitations and affordances.
They prohibit players from performing actions such as making jewelry out
of dice, but they also add meaning to the allowed actions and this affords
players meaningful actions that were not otherwise available; rules give
games structure. The board game needs rules that let the players move their
pieces as well as preventing them from making illegal moves; the video
game needs rules that let the characters move as well as rules that prevent
the character from reaching the goal immediately.
Sports and other physical games require an extra note here: Though the
explicit rules of soccer only state the dimensions of the playing field, the
ball's specifications, what the players can and cannot do, and the conditions
for winning, the game of soccer is also governed by the laws of physics-the
air resistance of the ball, gravity, the condition of the grass, and the limits of
human anatomy. If we compare the physical sport of soccer with a video
game version of soccer such as FIFA 2002, the video game adaptation
requires that the laws of physics and the human anatomy be explicitly
implemented in the programming on the same level as the explicit rules of
the game: A computer-based soccer game needs to implement the physics of
the players and the soccer pitch as well as the rules of the game. Gravity
existed prior to the invention of soccer, and the human body existed prior to
the invention of the foot race, so including them in a game is a choice that
the creators of the game make. It therefore makes sense to see the laws of
physics on the same level as the conventional rules in soccer: The main
difference between the rules of a video game and the rules of a sport is that
sports use the preexisting systems of the physical world in the game.
Strategies and State Machines
As explained in game theory by Neumann and Morgenstern, there is an
important distinction between rules and strategies: "Finally, the rules of the
game should not be confused with the strategies of the players.... Each player
selects his strategy-i.e. the general principles governing his choices-freely.
While any particular strategy may be good or badprovided that these
concepts can be interpreted in an exact sense-it is within the player's
discretion to use or to reject it. The rules of the game, however, are absolute
commands" (1953, 49). In game theory, a strategy is an overall plan for how
to act in the variety of different states that the game may be in. A complete
strategy is one that specifies unambiguously what the player should do for
every possible game state. In actuality, humans tend to play games with
incomplete and loosely defined strategies: A player may have a strategy that
applies to only a small subset of the possible ways in which the game can be
played, and will subsequently have to invent a new strategy if the game turns
out differently than expected.' Actual strategies tend to group many possible
game states into clusters in order to reduce the large number of potential
game states to a manageable set of more generalized situations (Holland
1998, 41). A dominant strategy is one that is always better than all other
strategies, regardless of the actions of any opponent.' A given game allows
for any number of different strategies, some of which will be more effective
than others. While the strategies of a game are different from the rules of the
game, the relative effectiveness of a potential strategy is a consequence of
the game rules.
Game theory also distinguishes between games of perfect information and
games of imperfect information: In the former case, all players have
complete knowledge of the game state at any given moment (Neumann and
Morgenstern 1953, 30). In the latter case, players only have partial
knowledge of the game state. Games of perfect information include many
traditional board games and a few video games such as Space Invaders
(Taito 1977), Tetris (Pazhitnov 1985), ChuChu Rocket (Sonic Team 2000),
and Tekken 3 Tag Tournament.3 Games of imperfect information include
most card games (since the hands of the other players are hidden) and the
majority of video games including all three-dimensional games (3-D
graphics hide things from the player's view).
To borrow from computer science, the rules of a game provide a state
machine. Briefly stated, a state machine is a machine that has an initial state,
accepts a specific amount of input events, changes state in response to inputs
using a state transition function (i.e., rules), and produces specific outputs
using an output function.' In a literal sense, a game is a state machine: A
game is a machine that can be in different states, it responds differently to
the same input at different times, it contains input and output functions and
definitions of what state and what input will lead to what following state
(e.g., the piece can move from E2 to E4, but not to E5; if you are hit with the
rocket launcher, you lose energy; if your base is taken, you have lost). When
you play a game, you are interacting with the state machine that is the game.
In a board game, this state is stored in the position of the pieces on the
board; in sports, the game state is the score and the players; in computerbased games, the state is stored in memory and then represented on screen.
Henceforth, I will be referring to the state of a game as the game state. If you
cannot influence the game state in any way (as opposed to being unable to
influence the game state in the right way), you are not playing a game.s
The game state only refers to the game, and not to the minds of the
players. For example, in a game of perfect information, the players will not
know in any detail the plans and thoughts of opponents; these are considered
external to the game state. What happens in the mind of the players will be
discussed later in the chapter. We can visualize the state machine of the
game as a game tree where each game state can lead to a number of other
game states, which can lead to other game states, until the game ends. Figure
3.1 is a small part of the game tree of tic-tac-toe.
It is often impractical to draw the complete game tree of a game, so the
game tree is most useful as a way of understanding the large number of
possibilities that a few simple rules can establish. In fact, a tic-tac-toe
program I have written shows that there are 211,568 possible tic-tac-toe
games-211,568 paths through the game tree of this simple game. The game
tree visualizes the dynamic possibilities of a game as a map that players
travel through when playing the game.
A partial game tree of tic-tac-toe.
► To see the complete listing of possible tic-tac-toe games, visit the book's
Web site at http://www.half-real.net/tictactoe.
Even though it is easier to illustrate the game tree of a turn-based game,
action games can also be seen as game trees, but with a much larger number
of branches from moment to moment.
Algorithmic Rules
Is there anything special about game rules? Rules are limitations as well as
affordances, but is there a limit to what can be a rule in a game? The rules in
games are designed to be above discussion, not in the sense that it is above
discussion what rules to use, nor in the sense that rules are never subject to
disagreement, but in the sense that the application of a specific rule should
be above discussion. If we think exclusively in terms of games played using
computers, the question of what kinds of rules can be implemented in a
computer program has already been specified in computer science with the
concept of an algorithm. In Donald Knuth's classic computer science
textbook, The Art of Computer Programming, he lists five important features
for an algorithm:
1. Finiteness. An algorithm must always terminate after a finite number of
steps....
2. Definiteness. Each step of an algorithm must be precisely defined; the
actions to he carried out must be rigorously and unambiguously specified
for each case....
3. Input. An algorithm has zero or more inputs ...
4. Output. An algorithm has one or more outputs ...
5. Effectiveness. An algorithm is also generally expected to be effective.
This means that all of the operations to be performed in the algorithm must
be sufficiently basic that they can in principle be done exactly and in a
finite length of time. (Knuth 1968, 4-6)
For our purposes, definiteness corresponds to the description of rules as
being unambiguous; finiteness and effectiveness imply that the rules of a
game have to be practically usable; input and output relate to the input and
output of the state machine described earlier. Knuth explains how a
cookbook recipe does not qualify as an algorithm:
Let us try to compare the concept of an algorithm with that of a cookbook
recipe: A recipe presumably has the qualities of finiteness (although it is said
that a watched pot never boils), input (eggs, flour, etc.) and output (TV
dinner, etc.) but notoriously lacks definiteness. There are frequent cases in
which the definiteness is missing, e.g., "Add a dash of salt." A "dash" is
defined as "less than s teaspoon"; salt is perhaps well enough defined; but
where should the salt be added (on top, side, etc.)? Instructions like "toss
lightly until mixture is crumbly," "warm cognac in small saucepan," etc., are
quite adequate as explanations to a trained cook, perhaps, but an algorithm
must be specified to such a degree that even a computer can follow the
directions. (Knuth 1968, 6)
Students of contemporary literary theory may find the demand for
definiteness daring since it is well known that any piece of text or informa
tion can potentially be understood in any number of ways, but in actuality,
algorithms can be definite because of the way they are constructed. In the
recipe example, Knuth points to the fact that the recipe can be understood by
a trained cook, but not by someone who has not cooked before. The recipe
presupposes knowledge about the problem domain-in this case cooking. For
something to be an algorithm, it has to be usable without an understanding of
the domain. As such, what can qualify as an algorithmand therefore what can
be made a rule in a game-hinges on a decontextualization: an algorithm can
work because it requires no understanding of the domain and because it only
reacts to very selected aspects of the worldthe state of the system; the well
defined inputs; but generally not the weather,6 the color of the computer
case, the personality of the computer operators, or the current political
climate.
This leads back to Goffman's notion of rules of irrelevance: playing a
game involves ignoring many aspects of the current context: "any apparent
interest in the aesthetic, sentimental, or monetary value of the equipment
employed" (1972, 19). As such, all game rules relate only to selected parts of
the context in which they are played. In state machine terms, this is because
a game has a predefined number of input events-the state of the game does
not change because the sky becomes overcast or because someone coughs; it
only changes when someone performs a permissible move: Game rules
relate to selected and easily measurable aspects of the game context. To
rephrase Goffman's description, every game rule also has a rule of relevance:
A rule includes a specification of what aspects of the game and game context
are relevant to the rule. The rules of relevance are a place where rules and
fiction meet in that learning a game also means learning to ignore the purely
decorative aspects of that game. This is part of the process of information
reduction, discussed later.
Compare two different possible versions of the checkmate rule in chess:
1. A player is in checkmate when his or her king is in a hopeless position.
2. A player is in checkmate when the king is checked [can be captured in the
next move] and he or she is unable to bring the king into an unchecked
position in one move.
The actual rule for checkmate is of course the second one, and it works
because the aspects of the game situation that are relevant to the rule are well
defined-only the positions of the pieces. Rule #1 would immediately lead to
long discussions about what constituted a hopeless position; whether a
position was hopeless would depend on how skilled the player was, which
could then be subject to discussion and so on. Rule #1 fails to work because
it does not specify what aspects of the context are relevantin Knuth's terms,
it lacks definiteness. Rule #2 works because it does specify what is relevant.
Furthermore, even when the relevant aspects of the context are specified,
rules still need to be specified in such a way that we can easily decide
whether a condition is met or not. Imagine two rules in soccer:
1. The ball is out of play when it is far away.
2. The ball is out of play when it crosses the white line drawn on the grass.
Both rules specify what aspect of the game context is relevant-in this case
the position of the ball-but the first one fails to specify it in sufficient detail
to be of any use. Again, rule #1 would likely lead to much discussion
because it is not easily decidable.' In a video game, the distinction is more
likely to be between what can be an enforceable rule (since the computer
keeps track of the game state, everything in the game is already measured)
and what players find to be an acceptable rule (players tend to become
frustrated if they cannot tell exactly what happened).
Making Rules, Changing Rules
How are the rules of a game determined? In a video game, the rules are
explicitly designed by the game developers, and usually developed through
play-testing. In a folk game, the rules of a game are developed, passed on,
and changed by thousands or even millions of independent players. In the
1894 report "Mancala, the National Game of Africa" (Culin [1894] 1971),
the American anthropologist Stewart Culin examined the diffusion and
variations of the game of mancala (also known as kalaha) around Africa and
the Middle East, and found considerable variations in the way the game was
played. Given the historical and geographical spread of the game, this makes
sense. Perhaps more surprising is that a game can undergo a considerable
amount of development and variation within a confined area and time
period. Jean Piaget has offered a more local and detailed description of the
negotiations about the rules of a "folk" game among children, a marble game
called "the square game":
As we had occasion to verify, the rules of the Square game are not the same
in four of the communes of Neuchatel situated at two to three kilometers
from each other. They are not the same in Geneva or Neuchatel. They differ,
on certain points, from one district to another, from one school to another in
the same town. In addition to this, as through our collaborator's kindness we
were able to establish, variations occur from one generation to another. A
student of twenty assured us that in his village the game is no longer played
as it was `in his days'. These variations according to time and place are
important, because children are often aware of their existence.
Finally, and clearly as a result of the convergence of these local or
historical currents, it will happen that one and the same game (like the
Square game) played in the playground of one and the same school admits
on certain points of several different rules. Children of 11 to 13 are familiar
with these variants, and they generally agree before or during the game to
choose a given usage to the exclusion of others. (Piaget 1976, 414-415)
This suggests that it is a common experience to discuss the variations in the
rules of a game, changing them at will, and being aware of a number of
different variations. Piaget documents that children are well versed in the art
of discussing the rules of games, and he confirms what I postulated in
chapter 2, that games generally require that the rules be agreed upon before
the game starts.
The Joy of Arguing about Rules
The description of rules having to be defined before a game starts makes it
sounds like disagreement about rules is always a problem, something that
stands in the way of the enjoyment of playing a game. But any aspect of the
enjoyment of games can potentially be placed in the background in favor of
something else that was previously considered a dull obstacle, and
discussing rules can in fact be enjoyable: In her article "Sex Differences in
the Games Children Play," Janet Lever compared the play of some eight
hundred children and concluded that the boys enjoyed discussing the rules of
a game: "During the course of this study, boys were seen quarrelling all the
time, but not once was a game terminated because of a quarrel and no game
was interrupted for more than seven minutes. In the gravest debates, the final
word was always, to `repeat the play,' generally followed by a chorus of
`cheater's proof.' In fact, it seemed that the boys enjoyed the legal debates as
much as they did the game itself" (1976, 482). I am not sure how far we can
extend the gender-specific aspects of this research, and we must be wary of
extending this description to cover all game players of all games, but it
certainly points to the possibility that the emphasis of a game can be shifted
so as to place the enjoyment somewhere else. Additionally, a few games
exist that are in themselves about the discussion of rules-Peter Suber's game
Nomic (1982) is a game about changing rules.' This does not challenge the
main point here, that the dominant way of playing games is to agree on the
rules before the game starts, and that arguing about rules is usually
considered an impediment to game play.
Other Rules: Gaming, Sportsmanship, Gravity
Still, the explicit rules are not the only rules in a game. The most obvious
example is the notion of sportsmanship: sports, especially, tend to have
associated with them a number of ideas of how the noble player should
perform. These ideas or conventions are loosely defined guidelines open to
interpretation that tend to be followed by players. I can see three main kinds
of sportsmanship:
1. Preventing bodily harm: Even if the rules would actually allow it,
players try to prevent injury.
2. Maintaining fairness in case of force majeure: In tournament soccer, if
one team has an injured player on the field, it is quite common for the other
team to kick the ball out of the playing field, in effect pausing play, letting
the injured player be treated, and giving the ball to the injured player's team.
In a real-time strategy game, this corresponds to letting another player pause
the game when they have to answer the phone.9
3. Keeping the game interesting: In some situations, a specific strategy
may increase the player's chance of winning, but make the game a dull affair.
In the game of Counter-Strike, violent discussion often breaks out around the
issue of camping: This is a strategy where a player simply stays hidden most
of the game waiting for unsuspecting players to walk by in order to promptly
shoot them (Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach 2002). This is not explicitly
disallowed by game, but players may agree not to camp. The problem is that
it is hard to describe camping in unambiguous terms-players do not move all
the time, so for how long is a player allowed to stay still? Furthermore, a
player that walks into a room and is immediately killed may feel that
camping was involved-even if the other player entered the room just a few
seconds earlier.
Sportsmanship is not strictly a rule according to my previous definition
since its ambiguity makes it subject to continued discussion and social
regulation.
Generally, to play a game also requires competence in initiating or
terminating game sessions and managing the interplay between the game and
the context in which the game is played. This has been called gaming and
gaming rules, and these are not rules as much as they are "rules for rules" in
games (Hughes 1999, 195). This is a worthwhile study in its own right, but
generally falls outside the scope of this book. Finally, many aspects of
physical games are specified by preexisting systems such as the laws of
physics, which are used as objets trouves or found objects, appropriated for
game purposes.
As such, the explicit game rules are not all there is to a game and games
do not appear in a void. Games have an undetermined relationship to what is
outside the game, and this is also part of the classic game model: the
negotiable consequences of the game. Games often incorporate many things
that are not specified in the rules.
Rule Structures: Games of Emergence and Games of
Progression
In the beginning of this chapter I discussed how games can present players
with challenges. This can be done in several different ways, but the two most
important ways are games of progression that directly set up each
consecutive challenge in a game, and games of emergence that set up
challenges indirectly because the rules of the game interact. To understand
this, compare two old video games, the simple table-tennis game of Pong
(figure 3.2) (Atari 1973) and the adventure game The Hobbit (figure 3.3)
(Melbourne's House 1984), where the object of the game is to complete the
travels of Bilbo as described in J. R. R. Tolkien's novel.
The Hobbit is a text-graphics hybrid adventure game where some of the
world is represented in graphics and most is represented in text. The player
interacts with the game exclusively through text input. To complete the
game, the player has to overcome a number of challenges such as getting a
key from some trolls without being eaten, escaping from a goblin, sailing a
river on a barrel, slaying a dragon using a helper, and finally getting back
home again. On the surface of things, The Hobbit is the more complex game,
having large amounts of graphics, dialogue, and a quite varied setting. Pong,
on the other hand is as simple as can possibly be. Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman have discussed how it can be difficult to understand why Pong
became a popular game:
Pong (Atari 1973).
I Figure 3.3 1
The Hobbit (Melbourne House 1984).
People love pong.
They do. But why?
Really. What's to love? There isn't much to the game; a pair of paddles
moves to blunt white lines on either side of a black screen, a blocky excuse
for a ball bounces between them, and if you miss the ball, your opponent
scores a point. The first player to score fifteen points win. (Salen and
Zimmerman 2004, 13)
They then list six reasons for playing Pong, the second one being the
following: "Every game is unique. Because the ball can travel anywhere on
the screen, Pong is an open-ended game with endless possibilities. Pong
rewards dedicated play: it is easy to learn, but difficult to master" (Salen and
Zimmerman 2004, 15). Therefore, Pong gives us a very rudimentary
example of how a game with very simple rules can provide variation and
replayability. The Hobbit, on the other hand, contains a wider range of
possible actions that the player can perform (picking up things, talking to
people, using objects to manipulate the world). Even so, the complete
solution to The Hobbit fits on a sheet of paper (figure 3.4).
When actually playing the game, the player will at first fail to find the
sequence of commands needed to complete the game. Having completed
The Hobbit, he or she finds little reason to play the game again; the
possibilities of the game are exhausted once it has been completed. This is
not to cast a value judgment on the two games, but simply to point out the
difference in the economy of their rules. A shorthand description of the rules
of Pong is as follows:
Pong: Players control a bat each (at the left and right side of the screen)
using a paddle. A ball is served by the computer; it bounces off two lines at
the top and bottom of the screen and off the player bats. Players can direct
the direction of the ball by hitting the ball with different parts of their bats.
The ball accelerates until a player fails to block the ball with his or her bat,
whereupon the other player scores a point. The first player to gain 15 points
wins.10
Pong has very few rules, yet it provides the players with a large possibility
space. A shorthand version of the rules of The Hobbit would follow the
general structure of the walkthrough above, first describing where Bilbo
starts, where the different players are, and what the conditions are for the
solution of each task in the game. In fact, the rules of The Hobbit are quite
similar to the preceding walk-through. The Hobbit provides challenges via
many rules, but even so, the possibility space of The Hobbit is quite small.
I Figure 3.4 1
Complete solution to The Hobbit.
I have chosen these old examples to point to the dual origins of the video
game. The history of video games can be seen as the product of two basic
game structures, the emergence structure of Pong and the progression
structure of adventure games. Though games of emergence are theoretically
much more interesting, I emphasize that the distinction is purely descriptive.
Chris Crawford has described a similar but not identical" normative
distinction between information-rich and processintensive games (1982, 46).
Crawford argues that since the computer is a data-processing device, a game
should take advantage of the computer's strengths by emphasizing
processing over data storage.'2 The distinction is also present in Harvey
Smith's call for systemic level design over special-case level design (2001),
which will be discussed later.
Before I describe these two game types in more detail, I suggest the
reader performs the game guide test of emergence on a number of games:
The game guide test of progression and emergence
Search for a guide to the game on the Internet. If the game guide is a
walkthrough (describing step by step what to do), it is a game of
progression. If the game guide is a strategy guide (describing rules of thumb
for how to play), it is a game of emergence.
Many games can be found on a scale between emergence and progression,
and their game guides are consequently a combination of step-by-step
descriptions ("get the red key, walk north, and open the third door") and
strategy guides ("in the large room, the best way of reaching the exit is to
work your way around the side while keeping all enemies at a distance using
the laser rifle"). There are two extremes of this scale and two primary ways
of creating hybrids:
• Pure progression games: The traditional adventure game is the purest
example of a progression game.
• Pure emergence games: The multiplayer board, card, action, or strategy
games are the purest examples of emergence games.
• Progression games with emergent components: The single-player action
game is usually a hybrid in that the player has to traverse a number of
areas each of which can be negotiated in a number of ways and are
therefore emergence structures.
• Emergence games with progression components: Multiplayer role-playing
games like EverQuest (Verant Interactive 1999) are hybrids where the
overall game structure is emergent but contains a number of small quests
where the player has to perform a sequence of events to complete the
quest.13
Games of Progression
Progression is the historically newer structure that entered the computer
game through the adventure genre. Most clear-cut progression games are
adventure games. The first adventure game is the text-based Adventure
(Crowther and Woods 1976). A typical start of Adventure looks like this (">"
marks what the player types.)
The traditional adventure game was based loosely on the fantasy genre
inspired by Tolkien: a world of elves, trolls, dragons, caves, and treasures.
During the 1980s, the genre changed from being text-based to being
primarily graphical." In The Longest Journey (Funcom 2000) the game
protagonist, April Ryan, is on board a ship threatened by a storm. To save
her, the player must perform a predefined sequence of events (figure 3.53.8). If the player does not perform the right actions, the game is over. It is
characteristic of progression games that there are more ways to fail than to
succeed (figure 3.9). The progression structure yields strong control to the
game designer: Since the designer controls the sequence of events, this is
also where we find the games with cinematic or storytelling ambitions.
The Longest Journey (Funcom 2000): Go to the cargo bay.
Games of Emergence
Emergence is the primordial game structure where a game is specified as a
small number of rules that combine and yield a large game tree, that is, a
large number of game variations that the players deal with by designing
strategies. Emergence is found in card and board games, most action, and all
strategy games. Almost all multiplayer games are games of emergence.
Games of emergence exhibit a basic asymmetry between the relative
simplicity of the game rules and the relative complexity of the actual playing
of the game. To give a non-electronic example, the rules of chess can be
described on a sheet of paper, but a well stocked bookstore carries shelf after
shelf of books on specific openings, gambits, endgames, and so on; there is
more to playing such games than simply memorizing the rules. In a game of
emergence, the game is therefore not as much a straight line as an open
landscape of possibilities: In chess you win by checkmating your opponentbut there is a myriad of end positions in chess that qualify as checkmate, and
each of these positions can be reached in an immense number of different
ways. A game of emergence has a broadly defined goal-there are many game
states that qualify as the goal-and a large number of ways to reach these
states.
I Figure 3.6 1
Eat some candy, leaving a candy wrapper.
Stop a hole with the wrapper and catch a worm.
I Figure 3.8 1
A storm appears.
Progression games: to complete the game, the player has
to perform exactly the actions that the game designer
planned or the game ends.
A terminological caveat about emergence: The term is commonly used
very loosely, and even scientific literature on emergence is often
contradictory. My goal here is not to write a treatise on the general
phenomenon of emergence, but to understand game rules. At a most basic
level, the question is whether emergence is a feature of the game systems
themselves or a feature of human cognition. There are good arguments for
both positions, and I will therefore borrow from a number of different
descriptions of emergence in order to distinguish between different types of
emergence in games.
Emergence in games has recently received much attention under the
heading of emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay is usually taken to be
situations where a game is played in a way that the game designer did not
predict. The game designer Harvey Smith has argued extensively for
systemic level design; game design that allows for emergent gameplay. He
makes the distinction between desirable emergence, where the interaction
between the different elements of the game leads to interesting gameplay,
and undesirable emergence, where players find ways to exploit the rules in
ways that make the game less enjoyable. The best-known example of the
latter is the proximity mine problem in Deus Ex (Ion Storm 2000), illustrated
in figure 3.10:
Some clever players figured out that they could attach a proximity mine to
the wall and hop up onto it (because it was physically solid and therefore
became a small ledge, essentially). So then these players would attach a
second mine a bit higher, hop up onto the prox[imity] mine, reach back and
remove the first proximity mine, replace it higher on the wall, hop up one
step higher, and then repeat, thus climbing any wall in the game, escaping
our carefully predefined boundaries. (Smith 2001)
Smith's distinction corresponds closely to the distinction between emergence
and progression games. Harvey Smith's aesthetic argument for systemic
level design is that it allows for more self-expression on the players' part; the
players can solve problems the way they want to solve them rather than in
the way the game designers planned. The practical argument is that it allows
content to be created faster, which mirrors the basic asymmetry mentioned.
Deus Ex (Ion Storm 2000): Climbing the will using mines
(from Smith 2001).
That rules and gameplay are asymmetrical, and that emergence games
give the player freedom to play a game using different strategies, are in
many ways flip sides of the same coin. This can be understood by way of
what is broadly called "the sciences of complexity" (cf. Waldrop 1994), the
study of systems (biological, economical, or otherwise) that exhibit an
asymmetry between the simplicity of some basic rules and the complexity of
the system. As Stephen Wolfram puts it: "Whenever you look at very
complicated systems in physics or biology ... you generally find that the
basic components and the basic laws are quite simple; the complexity arises
because you have a great many of these simple components interacting
simultaneously. The complexity is actually in the organization-the myriad of
possible ways that the components of the system can interact" (qtd. in
Waldrop 1994, 86).
This corresponds quite well to the asymmetry between rules and
gameplay in most games. What the sciences of complexity can provide is a
framework for understanding how this happens. As for the term emergence,
this is often taken to mean a higher-level pattern that is the result of
interaction between many lower-level entities. Classical examples of
emergence are life (life is molecules), consciousness (the result of
interactions between brain cells), anthills (there is no central command in an
anthill), bird flocks (there is no leader in a bird flock) (cf. Johnson 2001). As
you read this, no cell in your brain is the one that is really conscious; your
consciousness is an emergent property of the interactions between all your
brain cells. In John Holland's description: "Emergence, in the sense used
here, occurs only when the activities of the parts do not simply sum to give
activity of the whole. For emergence, the whole is indeed more than the sum
of its parts. To see this, let us look again at chess. We cannot get a
representative picture of a game in progress by simply adding the values of
the pieces on the board. The pieces interact to support one another and to
control various parts of the board" (1998, 14).
A more concrete example of how something complex can arise from
something simple is John Conway's Game of Life (Holland 1998, 136142).
Note that this is not a game, but an example of the emergent properties of
some simple rules. Conway's Game of Life takes place on a grid of squares,
each of which can be on (white) or off (black). The grid goes through a
number of steps, in each of which the following rules are applied:
• If a square is on, it dies with less than two neighbors (from loneliness) or
more than three neighbors (overcrowding).
• If a square is off, it is turned on if it has exactly three neighbors.
This may not sound very interesting, but it turns out to be a simple system
that generates a large number of different patterns (figure 3.11).
► It is hard to do justice to the Game of Life on paper; an online version is
available at http://www.half-real.net/gameoflife.
Game of Life: eight steps of a pattern generated by simple
rules. It eventually cycles between steps seven and eight.
The glider: A pattern that moves across the grid in four
steps.
All emergent systems are heavily connected. Their separate elements can
all potentially influence each other in due time. The Game of Life has
interesting properties because all its elements can interact with each other.
Much effort has been dedicated to the study of the Game of Life and the
more generalized field of cellular automata (for an example, see Wolfram
2002). One of the discoveries is that the Game of Life can support a number
of regular patterns, the most famous of which is the glider (figure 3.12). The
glider is a pattern that changes over the course of four steps, and finally
reappears shifted one position on the grid (position five is identical to
position one except it is shifted one position left and up). An animated
version of the Game of Life shows the glider crawling (or gliding) across the
computer screen. Patterns that are much more complex exist, such as the
glider gun, a pattern that regularly creates new gliders.
What Emergence Can Teach Us about Games
There is some disagreement about whether emergence is a property of a
system (Holland 1998, 5) or simply situations in which a game surprises its
designer (Johnson 2001, 179-180; Rouse 2001, 124-125), but as we are
interested in the human experience of playing games, we certainly can not
afford to leave out the psychological aspects of games. The original question
was how game rules provide challenges for players, and the ability of a game
system to surprise players is important for games. We can distinguish
between different variations of emergence in games: emergence as variation,
as patterns, as irreducibility, and as novelty or surprise.
1. Emergence as variation is the variety of possible states and game
sessions that a game's rules allow. Pong is an instance of variation coming
from the interaction between some very simple rules. This is not emergence
as surprise: It should be obvious that a large number of different games can
be played by having simple rules describing, for example, the movement of a
ball and some bats.
2. Emergence as patterns: These are patterns that players cannot
immediately deduce from the rules of the game.
• All game strategies. (Since a strategy requires regularity to work, strategies
require some kind of pattern in the gameplay of a game.)
• The team play required in Counter-Strike or the advantage of working in
groups in EverQuest. (Specific higher-level patterns.)
3. Emergence as irreducibility. In his article "Guidelines for Developing
Successful Games," game designer Bruce Shelley emphasizes the
importance of play-testing in game development: "Prototyping is not only
useful from a technology standpoint, but is also critical for testing gameplay.
Designers are usually left guessing until their games can be played. There
are always surprises when a game is first played, some good and some bad.
Prototyping for gameplay testing is especially useful for strategy and other
empty map games that do not depend on pre-planned or linear story lines"
(2001).
It is striking to compare Shelley's guideline for game design to what
Stephen Wolfram has written on the complexity of cellular automata: "This
complexity implies limitations of principle on analyses which can be made
of such systems.... The behaviour of the system can thus be found effectively
only by explicit simulation. No computational short cut is possible. The
system must be considered `computationally irreducible"' (1988). Most
games are irreducible; there is no shortcut to actually playing the game. And
the reason why Shelley puts less emphasis on play-testing for pre-planned or
linear (progression) games is, of course, that they are not emergent games
because their rules and game objects have very few potential ways of being
combined.
If commercial games require play-testing to develop, where does this
leave "folk" (non-commercial) games? Folk games are developed over long
periods of time. Since most traditional games are strongly emergent, no one
can predict from the rules how they will be played. Whenever changes are
made to the rules of a folk game (by deliberate design or simply by
misremembering), nobody can deduce whether this will lead to good game
sessions is by playing the game. What happens then is that rule changes that
lead to interesting game sessions survive by word of mouth, but the rule
changes that lead to boring game sessions die out.
4. Emergence as novelty or surprise: This is in its simplest form when
several rules or objects in a game are combined in a hitherto unseen way and
surprise a human player or designer.
• In the game of Quake III Arena, this includes rocket jumping, which is the
tactic of jumping into the air, firing a rocket into the ground below, and
flying on the shockwave of the blast. (This is a way of jumping further
than you would otherwise be able.)
• Harvey Smith's example (2001) of proximity mine climbing in Deus Ex is
also emergence as novelty.
Designing a game with many connections between different objects and
rules certainly increases the likelihood that players will find unpredicted rule
combinations.
Emergence and the Player
All emergent systems contain a high number of interactions between the
different parts of the system. This observation provides a more precise way
of differentiating between games of emergence and games of progression: In
a game of emergence, a large percentage of the rules and objects in the game
can potentially influence each other; in a game of progression, most rules
and objects are localized. Strategy games are highly emergent and have a
large degree of connectedness, since every move and unit can potentially
matter to every other move and unit in the game. On the other hand, many
games of exploration contain large areas that the player has to traverse,
where the exact path the player follows is inconsequential-in a strategy
game, the exact path of each piece always potentially matters to every other
piece.
I mentioned the question of whether emergence is in the game itself or
just in the mind of the player. Harvey Smith's examples (2001) describe
situations where the game designer was surprised by what happened in the
game, but he concludes that to promote emergent gameplay, games should
be designed in a specific "systemic" way where the objects in the game can
interact in many different ways. The experience of surprise occurs because
the player and designer do not imagine the entire game tree and all possible
game sessions. Emergence as novelty is therefore an interaction between the
game system and human cognition. A game with many objects that interact
according to well-defined rules can surprise a player in a way where the
player can afterwards understand what did happen because the game
proceeded according to clear rules.
Games between Emergence and Progression
Progression and emergence are the two extreme ways of creating games. In
practice, most games fall somewhere between these poles.
To give a high-profile example, in Grand Theft Auto III the player is free
to drive around the city and to take on the missions that various dubious
characters offer. "Deal Steal" is a typical mission that takes place about onethird of the way through the game (figure 3.13-3.19). Grand Theft Auto III is
structured in two different ways: In the big picture, the game is a linear
sequence that the player has to complete, from being betrayed in the
beginning of the game to finally getting revenge. There are a few optional
missions and a few missions that can be completed in different order, but
overall Grand Theft Auto III is a game of progression. Nonetheless, "Deal
Steal" shows how the goals do not specify how they are to be achieved. It is
up to the player to complete the mission in the way he or she wants. In
diagram form, this is illustrated in figure 3.20. The advantage of structuring
a game like this is that the player experiences a predefined story by
completing the missions, while having freedom to solve the tasks in different
ways. Even though the player is in principle free to ignore the missions,
most players will try to complete them because they want to, because it is
more interesting to undertake the missions than not to. So even figure 3.20
does not quite express the flexibility of the game.
Grand Theft Auto 111 (Rockstar Games 2001). An
indicator on the map (lower left corner) shows where to
receive a mission.
Gameplay: Rules in Action
While we can, in principle, list all the rules that govern any game and then
proceed to draw the game tree of the game, this does not tell us how the
game will be played. The term gameplay is commonly used to describe this
dynamic aspect of a game. It is important to understand that the gameplay is
not the rules themselves, the game tree, or the game's fiction, but the way the
game is actually played. Richard Rouse's discussion of gameplay focuses
primarily on gameplay as a property of the game:
Kenji explains that we should help him by getting rid of a
gang.
Leaving Kenji, the mission is explained in detail: The
player has to steal a specific car, a yardie.
Once in the car, the map indicates where to drive to.
It turns out to be an ambush.
Having disposed of all the enemies, pick up a suitcase and
return it to Kenji's casino.
Fulfilling the mission, a $25,000 reward.
Grand Theft Auto 111 is a series of missions, each of
which can be solved in many ways.
A game's gameplay is the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game
includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how
that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes. (Rouse 2001, xviii)
All the glitz and glitter poured into games these days, such as expensive art,
animation, real actors, or the best musicians, cannot cover up for poor
gameplay. (Saltzman 1999, 16)
Quake 111 Arena (ID Software 1999)
The Rouse quotation describes gameplay as the purely dynamic aspect of
games: the interactivity, the way the player can interact with the game world,
and the way in which the game world reacts. The Saltzman passage is the
archetypal statement about the importance of gameplay-gameplay as the fun
factor of games, the secret ingredient that makes them worth playing 15
Where does gameplay come from? I believe that gameplay is not a mirror
of the rules of a game, but a consequence of the game rules and the
dispositions of the game players. For example, the two games of Quake III
Arena (figure 3.21) and Counter-Strike (figure 3.22) have mostly similar
rules, but are considered very different gameplay experiences:
"CounterStrike is a game of kill or be killed. But unlike Quake III Arena or
Unreal Tournament, it's not a mindless action game that involves nothing
more than twitch-shooting" (Ajami and Campanaro 2001). It is a general
trait of emergent systems that a small change can have big ramifications
throughout the system, and this is also the case with games: Quake III Arena
is a fast-paced first-person shooter. When players die, they respawn within a
few seconds. Even when playing multiplayer team games, the game tends to
be fairly individual.
Counter-Strike (The Counter-Strike Team 2000)
Unlike Quake III Arena, Counter-Strike is famous for its team-oriented
gameplay, but since there are no rules in Counter-Strike that tell the players
to "play team-oriented," the question is, what makes CounterStrike a teamoriented game? Counter-Strike only adds a few variations on the team-based
modes of Quake III Arena: Players do not respawn during a round, there are
goals that can win an entire round for a team, and players move more slowly
and are much more vulnerable. As it turns out, these variations completely
change the game to be more oriented toward team play. Since the player has
only one life per round, death becomes something to be avoided at all costs.
This makes it very important for players to work together. In even a simple
skirmish, being in a group is much better than being alone. Having your
back covered becomes important. Communication therefore becomes
important. In this way, very simple rule changes can completely change the
gameplay of a game. This is how Counter-Strike can be team-oriented even
though it does not say so anywhere in its rules.
As has now been discussed, emergence allows for variation and
improvisation that was not anticipated by the game designer, variation that is
not easily derivable from the rules of the game. However, this does not mean
that players are free to do what they like or that their behavior is devoid of
patterns or regularity. Even in an emergent system, some events can still be
determined or at least be very likely to happen. This can be a property of the
system-some games tend to drift toward certain outcomes no matter what the
players do-as well as a psychological effect. The psychological effect is
straightforward: Especially in multiplayer games, players tend to accept the
rules and agree to pursue the game goal. This means that players will tend to
do certain things. Since players pursue the game goal, they will search for a
good strategy. If the game allows for a good strategy that leads to interesting
interaction, it is a good game. If the optimal strategy for playing the game
leads to dull game sessions, the game will be considered uninteresting.
Games of Counter-Strike usually lead to skirmishes between the two
teams. Neither the Counter-Strike instructions nor the Counter-Strike
programming state that fights will take place, but they take place because the
players try to win, and because winning is best achieved by subduing the
other team. To give a non-electronic example, a game of Monopoly usually
ends with a player going bankrupt. There is no rule in Monopoly stating, "a
player will go bankrupt," but this nevertheless almost always happens as a
result of the rules and the players' desire to win. Viewed as a game tree,
Monopoly ends with a player going bankrupt because the players explore
specific parts of the game tree in order to win. Gameplay therefore results
from the interaction between three different things:
1. The rules of the game.
2. The player(s)' pursuit of the goal. The player seeks strategies that work
due to the emergent properties of the game.
3. The player's competence and repertoire of strategies and playing methods.
As such, game design is about designing rules so that the actual strategies
used by the players are enjoyable to execute.
Since gameplay is in many ways unpredictable, the actual playing of a
game may reveal unanticipated dominant or plainly uninteresting strategies.
When game companies issue patches, they often address not only technical
bugs or incompatibilities with specific hardware, but also modify the rules of
a game in order to prevent uninteresting gameplay.'6
Garneplay and the Social
In the Counter-Strike example, the small modification of the rules compared
to Quake III Arena changed the best strategies from being mostly individual
to being mostly team-oriented. In the case of multiplayer games, rules are
generally designed to make sure that the best strategies require interaction
between the players. It would be very easy to design a multiplayer game
where the optimal strategy was to avoid other players at all time. This
would, however, not be a very interesting game. In the board game of
Ludo/Parcheesi, the rule for capturing makes it pay off to seek out other
players and interact with them (since it sends their pieces back to square
one). The rule could be reversed so that the player who lands on an
opponent's piece is the one that is sent back to square one. In this case, it
would not pay off to seek out other players on the board, and player-toplayer interaction would generally be discouraged by the game. CounterStrike is more than just team play for a single game session: Counter-Strike
has a large community of players who form clans, meet for tournaments to
compete, and discuss strategy tips on web sites. The fact that communication
and strategic planning is important for victory in Counter-Strike is an
important incentive to build community-being part of a community will
make you a better player. Similarly EverQuest promotes playing in groups
and guilds simply because this is the best strategy (and in many cases the
only working strategy) for fighting higher-level monsters.
This explains Johan Huizinga's observation that play/games can produce
social groupings (1950, 3). The rules, the player's skills and the resultant
gameplay can encourage community-building around a given game. The
gameplay of a game is the basis for the building of player-driven
communities.' 7
Enjoyable Rules: Interesting Choices and Aesthetics of Mind
If games are enjoyable, and enjoyment partially comes from the gameplay of
the game, the question is then, what is quality gameplay? The most famous
one-line description of game quality describes it as hinging on challenging
choices: "A game is a series of interesting choices" (Sid Meier, in Rollings
and Morris 2000, 38).
What is an interesting choice? Elsewhere, Sid Meier has described three
criteria for interesting choices:
1. No single option should be the best.
2. The options should not be equally good.
3. The player must be able to make an informed choice. (Rouse 2001, 27-28)
In Sid Meier's description, an "interesting choice" is one that is mentally
challenging (strategic rather than skill-oriented). A simple game such as
rock-paper-scissors does meet the first criterion since there is no single
option that is the best-scissors beat paper, paper beats rock, rock beats
scissors. If we played an alternative version where the scissors were made of
kryptonite and could cut through rock, all players would choose scissors and
the game would cease to hold interest. Rock-paper-scissors fails the second
criterion-it does not really matter which one we choose. According to the
third criterion, it is not sufficient for a game to contain a choice that is
slightly better than the other choices if the player does not understand it.
Our example of the tic-tac-toe example in chapter 2 can also be viewed in
this new perspective: Tic-tac-toe ceases to be enjoyable over time. Once you
figure out a complete strategy, the game ceases to provide you with any
interesting choices-and tic-tac-toe remains a children's game.
Marcel Danesi's book on puzzles, The Puzzle Instinct (2002), provides
another starting point for considering the quality of gameplay. Though
puzzles are just a small subset of games, being usually considered the kind
of single-solution tasks that constitutes a step in an adventure game, Danesi
has some relevant opinions on the quality of a challenge. In Danesi's view,
Puzzles are pleasurable in themselves. The suspense that accompanies an
attempt to find a solution to a challenging puzzle, or the anxiety that
develops from not finding one right away, is a significant part of what makes
the puzzle so fascinating and engaging.... The peculiar kind of pleasure that
puzzles produce can be called an aesthetics of mind.... Poetry and music, for
instance, evoke a cathartic response that imparts a sense of meaningfulness
to existence. This can be called, more specifically, an aesthetics of
emotion....
Needless to say, some puzzles are more intellectually pleasurable than
others are. The aesthetic index of a puzzle, as it may be called, seems to be
inversely proportional to the complexity of its solution or to the obviousness
of the pattern, trap, or trick it hides. (Danesi 2002, 226-227)
From a game perspective, puzzles hold a unique place in that they usually
conceal their own solution or even lead the player down the wrong path in
the quest for a solution: "A man was watching his son pick apples, noticing
that the number of apples in his basket doubled every minute and that it was
full at precisely 12 noon. At what time was the basket half full?" (Danesi
2002, 29).
The reader should consider this puzzle before continuing. The solution is
here." This puzzle, as is common, tries to trick the reader into believing that
the solution is much more complex than it is.
An emergent game will generally not present challenges that have been
designed to be misleading, but the player may in actuality be lead to attempt
to solve a challenge in a wrong way. What is shared between puzzles and
most games is the mode of reasoning needed in order to play the game:
Danesi distinguishes between puzzles that can be solved using
straightforward reckoning and puzzles that require insight thinking. This is
the difference between challenges that can be solved using a simple routine
and therefore do not require any ingenuity, and the more interesting (or
actual) puzzles that require some thinking "outside the box."
According to an anecdote from Danesi, John von Neumann, the cocreator
of economic game theory, was present at a cocktail party where the
following riddle was told:
Two children, a boy and a girl, were out riding their hikes yesterday, coming
at each other from opposite directions. When they were exactly 20 miles
apart, they began racing toward each other. The instant they started, a fly on
the handlebar of the girl's hike also started flying toward the boy. As soon as
it reached the handlebar of his hike, it turned and started hack toward the
girl. The fly flew hack and forth in this way, from handlebar to handlebar,
until the two bicycles met. Each bike moved at a constant speed of 10 miles
an hour, and the swifter fly flew at a constant speed of 15 miles an hour.
How much distance did the fly cover? (Danesi 2002, 33-34)
Please try to solve the riddle before proceeding.
In the story, Neumann rushed into an adjacent room, and the teller of the
riddle explained the simple solution to the audience: Since the two children
are 20 miles apart and bike at 10 miles per hour, they will meet in one hour.
Moreover, since the fly flies at 15 miles per hour, the fly will cover 15 miles
during that time. Neumann then rejoined the party and exclaimed the
solution to be "15 miles!" The teller of the riddle commented that this was
interesting since most mathematicians usually failed to see the simple
solution and instead tried to solve the problem as the sum of an infinite
series of ever-smaller numbers, to which Neumann exclaimed, "Well, that's
how I solved it!" (Danesi 2002, 3334).
We can extend Danesi's ideas to focus on the player of games and
puzzles: (1) Different people have different tools available for the solving of
problems. (2) For Neumann, a brilliant mathematician, the preceding riddle
did not work as a riddle since he had the tools to solve it using
straightforward reckoning. In general terms, a given task will not be equally
challenging to all players. Tic-tac-toe is only challenging up to a certain
point in life after which it becomes trivial. This also means that there is no
guarantee that a puzzle works as a puzzle: The player may simply be too
smart, and the tools for solving, for example, a mathematical puzzle can
improve over time, rendering it too easy for the general public.
Improving with Practice: The Player Repertoire
If games are challenging, they are also challenging in a way that players
often learn to surmount. To play a game is essentially a learning experience
where the player acquires the skills needed to overcome the challenges of the
game. Cognitive scientists Allen Newell and Paul S. Rosenbloom have noted
that-for any task-practice almost always brings improvement in
performance: "Practice makes perfect. Correcting the overstatement of a
maxim: Almost, always, practice brings improvement, and more practice
brings more improvement" (1981, 1). In other words, players improve their
skills at playing a game over time. If a game has to be challenging to be
enjoyable, it means that the game must match the current skill level of the
player.
But how do players improve their playing? In a 1996 article, Hilde Haider
and Peter Frensch list four types of theories of skill acquisition: "Existing
theories of skill acquisition generally assume that the effects of practice on
task performance are due to either (a) qualitative changes in the effective
task structure ... (b) an increased efficiency of performing individual task
components ... (c) an increased efficiency in performing sequences of task
components, or (d) some combination of these mechanisms" (1996, 305).
For our purposes, we need not settle on one specific theory. We can focus on
the larger picture, that players improve their skills over time, and on two
theories of skill acquisition that are undoubtedly not exhaustive but can tell
us something about game playing. In their article, Haider and Frensch
present a theory of type (a), according to which performance improvement
stems from learning to process only information that is relevant to
completing a task:
We argue that people learn, over the course of practice, to separate
taskrelevant from task-redundant information and to limit their processing to
relevant aspects of the task. Thus, the information processed early in skill
acquisition may be qualitatively different from the information processed
late in skill acquisition. [Performance improvement] may at least partially
reflect systematic reductions in the amount of information that is processed,
rather than changes in the efficiency with which task components can be
performed. (Haider and Frensch 1996, 305)
This theory will especially be useful in chapter 4, for understanding how the
fictional aspect of a game can lose importance over time as the player learns
to ignore elements of the fictional world that are not implemented in the
rules.
For a general understanding of challenges, Newell and Rosenbloom
present the better-known theory of chunking (a theory of type (c) according
to Haider and Frensch), which states that people improve at processing
information (and completing tasks) by combining a number of primitive
elements of the environment into high-level chunks, which are then
processed faster than it would be to process every primitive element: "The
performance program of the system is coded in terms of high-level chunks,
with the time to process a chunk being less than that time to process its
constituent chunks" (1981, 42). For example, a master chess player can
memorize and understand chess positions at great speed because he or she
has a large collection of chunks.
According to Newell and Rosenbloom, "The master has acquired an
immense memory for chess positions, organized as a collection of chunks.
His ability for immediate perception and short-term memory of chess
positions depends directly on how many chunks are used to encode a
position.... By implication, master players must spend an immense amount
of time with the game, in order to acquire the large number of chunks; this
seems to be well supported by historical data" (1981, 50).
The theory of chunking is just one of many theories on skill acquisition,
but it can serve as a starting point. Let us think about games not specifically
in terms of chunking, but in terms of methods: a game will demand a
specific repertoire of methods (or skills) that the player has to master in
order to overcome its challenges. Having mastered or completed a game, the
player will have expanded his or her repertoire to include the repertoire
demanded by the game. This is, I think, a quite overlooked aspect of playing
games, that a game changes the player that plays it. The negotiation of the
challenges of a game can be described in general terms:
• A player will, at any given time, have a repertoire of methods to use for
playing a game. Improving skills at playing a game involves expanding
and refining the repertoire.
• A quality game must present the player with challenges, continually letting
the player develop a better repertoire for methods for playing the game,
while continually preventing the player from playing the game just using a
well defined routine.
Progression: Working with the Player's Repertoire
Different games provide challenges in different ways. This is apparent in the
distinction between games of progression that are only completed once, and
games of emergence that can be played to their conclusion many times. In
the progression game, the challenges presented can be explicitly designed on
a case-by-case basis, and the designer can work with the player's current
expectations and current repertoire. In the emergence game, the rules of the
game must keep producing new challenges by way of their design.
In the elegant puzzle game, ChuChu Rocket, the player must guide a
number of mice to a number of spaceships. The player cannot directly
control the mice, but only place a limited number of directional arrows and
then the mice start. Mice change direction according to the arrows they
encounter. If the player has placed the arrows correctly, the mice eventually
end up in the spaceships. On some stages, the mice are threatened by cats
that need to be avoided. The first stage is, as in any good game, very simple
(figure 3.23). The mice are simple creatures and move according to the very
simple rules stipulated here. On the first stage, the player has one "up" arrow
to use, and has to bring the mice to the six spaceships on the top of the
screen. This is easily done by placing the arrow anywhere in the path of the
mice (figure 3.24). The game makes the player build a repertoire of methods
for moving the mice. The first method is the straightforward one: Place an
arrow pointing in the direction of the spaceships. Soon, however the player
finds that this does not suffice: on stage 5, only an up arrow is available, but
since the only spaceship is placed on the bottom row, the first method will
not solve the problem (figure 3.25). It turns out that the up arrow can be used
to send the mice on a major detour that will eventually bring them to the
spaceship. The player's understanding of the game is challenged because the
goal at this level cannot be attained using the method learned at level 1, and
the player must now expand his or her repertoire to include how walls can be
used to control mice indirectly. Additionally, the player may have picked up
another method, the pattern in figure 3.26. This is a "staircase" pattern:
sending the mice up in the lower right corner leads them to the lower left
corner, upper left corner, and upper right corner. Any number of these can be
stacked and mirrored; it is a good strategy to look for such patterns on the
screen on the later stages. Stage 5 may therefore have expanded the player's
repertoire with two additional methods. The staircase pattern is also a chunk
as described by Newel and Rosenbloom previously.
ChuChu Rocket (Sonic Team 2000). Basic rules for mouse
movement.
I Figure 3.24
The mice follow the arrow to a spaceship. The spaceships take off.
Only an up arrow is provided, but the mouse needs to go
down. However, the up arrow can be used indirectly.
Staircase pattern in ChuChu Rocket.
The skilled puzzle designer can thus work with the player by
foregrounding a specific kind of method that then turns out not to work. For
example, in stage 10 of the "special" puzzles, the puzzle is set up to divert
the player from the solution (figure 3.27). Stage 10 is divided into four
squares. I solved the top right one first: Here I had to set an arrow to make
the mouse go to the spaceship without colliding with the cat. I then worked
for a while to solve the other three challenges with success except for the
bottom left square. No matter how I placed the arrow, I could not make the
mouse avoid the cat. The puzzle design foregrounded a specific method of
solving the problem, that of controlling the mouse. The solution turned out
to be to control the cat rather than the mouse (figures 3.28-3.29). According
to Danesi, a puzzle tries to conceal its own answer, and the foregrounding of
the wrong solution-only controlling the mouse-is an instance of that. It helps
explain the attraction of ChuChu Rocket: The game also works well because
it has cats and mice; this lets the game cue the players into foregrounding
either mice or cats, thereby playing with their expectations and tricking them
into focusing on the wrong parts of their repertoire.
Level ten: four arrows, one for each mouse?
Solution to level ten. Bottom left cat hits the arrow, turns
down.
Just in time to let the mouse pass. Success.
Emergence: Naturally Occurring Challenges
Games of progression allow for challenges that are explicitly designed to
trick the player into focusing on the wrong aspect of the game, but some
puzzle-like situations occur "naturally" in games of emergence. Chess
puzzles, such as the one in figure 3.30, are a prime example. For a mediocre
chess player like me, the easiest way to produce a checkmate is by
threatening the king with one piece while protecting this piece with another
piece-this is one of the most basic methods in my chess repertoire. In this
puzzle, I therefore immediately focused on moving the queen to G8, thus
threatening the black king while being protected by the knight on H6.
However, I realized that the black rook on F8 would capture the queen, and I
therefore abandoned this scheme. The solution turns out to be:
White to Move and Checkmate in Two
White to move and checkmate in two (The Tech 2003).
1. QG8+ RxG8
2. NF7x
The queen does go to G8, is captured by the black rook from F8, but since
that rook is now at G8, the white knight can move from H6 to F7, thereby
checkmating the king who is locked in the corner of the board due to the
rook at G8. In other words, the chess puzzle foregrounds using the queen to
checkmate, then tricks me into rejecting this solution, which in fact turns out
to be part of the correct solution after all. While this chess puzzle may be
designed explicitly, it is also a naturally occurring position in chess-in a
normal game of chess, the players may actually reach the position of this
chess puzzle. Emergence games may automatically create puzzle-like
situations that foreground wrong solutions, tricking the players to activate
the wrong parts of their repertoire, and this is an effect of emergent systems'
ability to surprise. In a multiplayer game, players may also try to trick their
opponents into focusing on the wrong part of their repertoire by signaling
that they intend to attack somewhere they are not going to attack, and so on.
This chess puzzle also demonstrates that the element of surprise in games
of emergence is due to the way humans think about the world. A computer
program that dumbly considers every possible position of chess will not be
surprised or thrown off track. Humans are tricked because we play games
not by going through every possible position in the game tree, but by finding
patterns in the game by chunking or by ignoring information. These ways of
playing the game are often imprecise simplifications, and so games surprise
us.
Standard Types of Emergent Challenges
That emergent systems are unpredictable also means that they cannot
consistently surprise the player, nor can they be consistently satisfying in
relation to the player's repertoire. There are, however, a number of standard
ways or patterns by which challenges can be automatically generated by the
rules of a game. While it would be interesting to create a comprehensive and
well organized collection of ways in which an emergent game can create
challenges, this is certainly outside the scope of this book, and I will instead
discuss a few recent attempts at this. Inspired by the work of Christopher
Alexander, Bernd Kreimeier and others have initiated the game design
patterns project.'9 This project aims to collect and describe a large number of
game design patterns, each pattern being a description of a name, a problem,
a solution, and its consequences (Kreimeier 2002). For example, Bjork,
Holopainen, and Lundgren (2003) describe a mutual goal pattern where
several players share a common goal thus encouraging team play. This
pattern is an alternative to the pattern of symmetrical goals, where players
have mutually exclusive goals.
Let us examine three patterns that in different ways demonstrate how
games of emergence are not necessarily unpredictable: triangularity, which
relates to the question of interesting choices; individual bases, which is a
very general pattern that creates tradeoffs between offensive and defensive
play styles; and choke points, which show how the physical layout of a game
affects gameplay.
Triangularity and Orthogonal Unit Design
Kreimeier notes that the first game design pattern to have been explicitly
described is the rock-paper-scissors device previously mentioned, as this
provides the most basic type of "semi-interesting choice," in that no single
option is consistently preferable over any other. This kind of three-step
relation between choices has been described in different ways. Chris
Crawford (1982) has termed it triangularity. Rollings and Morris use the
term intransitivity to describe the fact there is no fixed hierarchy between
choices, units, strategies, or moves: the relation between them changes
(2000, 40). Intransitive relations in games are first described by Neumann
and Morgenstern (1953, 39, 52). The simplest form of intransitivity is found
in games where three types of units are locked in a circular relationship
(figure 3.31). In this case, the archer is stronger than the warrior, the warrior
is stronger than the barbarian, and the barbarian is stronger than the archer.
In actual gameplay, this will mean that each player has to second-guess the
actions of the other players and, depending on terrain, economics,
recognizance, and other factors, build an army with a suitable combination
of units.
Harvey Smith has described this type of relation in a more general way as
orthogonal unit differentiation (2003). This means designing the game so
that every unit has strengths and weaknesses along several different axes: An
archer may be weak in melee battle, strong at a distance, but slow to move.
Another unit may be strong in melee, but weak at a distance. The key is to
make sure that there are a number of different non-overlapping axes that the
units can be placed along rather than just one axis such as "strength." If units
simply have varying degrees of strength, the player's choices are simple and
actual gameplay is predictable. With orthogonal unit design, many different
kinds of unexpected gameplay may occur.
An intransitive relationship between three units in a game
(Rollings and Morris 2000, 42).
A More Basic Pattern: Individual Bases
The basic pattern of individual bases can be found in multiplayer action
games, strategy games, soccer, baseball, tennis, chess, and many other
games. Any game in which each player (or team) has a personal base or unit
that needs protection (to prevent goals from being scored, the base from
being captured, a flag from being captured, or just a player from being
killed) inevitably generates a tradeoff and thereby interesting choices
between offensive and defensive strategies: An offensive strategy focuses on
attacking the opponent's base; a defensive strategy focuses on defending
your own.
Choke Points
First-person shooters tend to contain a number of choke points: These are
locations on a specific game level or map where opposing teams tend to
meet in decisive confrontations. Andersen, Giittler, and Folmann (2001)
analyzed a number of Counter-Strike maps using computer-controlled
players to pinpoint the choke points of each map. The popular DE - DUST
map features two locations where teams tend to meet (figure 3.32). The
existence of choke points leads to a number of potential strategies. The two
teams will tend to have a shared awareness of the choke points on a map,
and can therefore mutually work with the expectations of the other team.
Switching between the choke points that are the focus of their movements,
they can fake an offensive against one choke point using only a few players,
thus foregrounding that choke point, while secretly preparing to attack
through another choke point.
Counter-Strike, the DE_DUST map: Choke points are
marked with black ellipses (Andersen, Guttler, and
Folmann 2001).
Changing Game Design Patterns
There is probably a limit to how detailed and comprehensive a collection of
game design patterns can be since actual patterns may be loosely defined,
changing or overlapping. There are some additional issues regarding how
patterns should be expressed: Since games are not strictly designed to solve
problems, it makes little sense to describe game design patterns exclusively
as being responses to "problems"-in many cases the "problem" is only
meaningfully described as "the game is not interesting." Two parallel
enterprises, covered in the articles "Better by Design: The 400 Project"
(Falstein 2002) and "Formal Abstract Design Tools" (Church 1999) have
slightly different philosophies: The 400 project consists of informally stated
design principles that (using a card game metaphor) can trump each other,
while the formal abstract design tools, despite its name, works on a more
detailed level but in no fixed format.20 While these three projects are useful
and interesting they are also Herculean, volatile and subject to fads and
fashions, as such projects would be for any other area such as film, literature,
or music.
The Aesthetics of Challenges
Players come to a game with very different qualifications and repertoires. A
few different solutions have been proposed for dealing with this, the most
simple of which is allowing players to select their skill level. Save games are
considered a more controversial technique, whereby the player can store a
snapshot of the game session and resume it later. Save games are accused of
decreasing the dramatic tension of the game since the player simply reloads
if something goes wrong. Another argument against save games is that
saving makes the game too easy. Counterbalancing these two arguments is
the immense frustration to be had if you are forced to replay an entire game
level simply because you made a mistake at the very end.2' For example, the
recent games Hitman: Codename 47 (IO Interactive 2000) and Giants:
Citizen Kabuto (Planet Moon Studios 2000) have been criticized for lacking
an in-level save function (Osborne 2000a, 2000b). A third argument is that
the possibility of saving destroys the player's sense of immersion because it
shifts the focus to the game on a meta level. Chris Crawford's position is the
more categorical-that save games are a symptom of design flaws:
Experienced garners have come to regard the save-die-reload cycle as a
normal component of the total gaming experience.... Any game that requires
reloading as a normal part of the player's progress through the system is
fundamentally flawed. On the very first playing, even a below-average
player should be able to successfully traverse the game sequence. As the
player grows more skilled, he may become faster or experience other
challenges, but he should never have to start over after dying. (qtd. in
Rollings and Morris 2000, 80)
It seems that Crawford is mostly thinking about replayable games rather than
exploratory and adventure games. There are scarcely any games that fit
Crawford's description of being possible to complete in the first go and
being replayable and interesting afterwards. Additionally, save games are
part of what has allowed video games to develop beyond the classic game
model. The only way most players can play a game that takes fifty or
hundreds of hours is by using save games. Save games are probably not an
evil to be avoided at all costs. They are by now a staple of video games on
personal computers and consoles, and one of the ways in which players with
different skills and repertoires can adjust the difficulty of the challenges in a
game: the skillful player can overcome a challenge quickly, while the inept
player can retry any number of times without having to replay all the
previous challenges of the game.
Single or Multiple Solutions?
One of the assumptions behind Harvey Smith's (2001) call for emergence
and systemic level design is that having multiple solutions to a problem is
always better than having a single solution. Smith's argument is that players
will prefer being able to solve challenges in their own ways, thus expressing
their personalities rather than having to second-guess the designer's
intention. But this is probably not all there is to it. Most of the puzzle
examples mentioned earlier have a single solution, and Danesi's notion of an
aesthetic index focuses on single-solution problems. Another writer on
puzzles, Stewart T. Coffin, says of a puzzle that "it has only one solution,
usually a mark of good design" (1974, chap. 1). The disagreement may to
some extent be a question of genre and the cuing of player expectations.
Harvey Smith's prime example, Deus Ex, promises an elaborate and fairly
open world where the player will probably expect to be able to solve
problems in any number of ways. In the puzzle genre, the player seems to
expect that there will be one single, perfect solution.
The stronger argument for systemic level design is probably the question
of consistency-that the players can perform the actions that they have been
cued into believing they can do. It can be a problem when the representation
of the game cues the player into attempting to perform an action that is not
implemented in the rules. This is covered in more detail in chapter 5.
The Problem with Challenges
A compelling aspect of the focus on challenges is that it is a perfect match
for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow framework (1990): Csikszentmihalyi
claims that flow is a mental state of enjoyment shared by people in a variety
of situations such as rock-climbing, chess-playing, and composing music.
According to the flow framework, the player will enjoy playing if the
challenges match the player's abilities and thereby lead to a state of flow. If
the game is too hard, the player will experience anxiety or frustration. If the
game is too easy, repetition or triviality of choice will make the player bored.
In diagram form, any given challenge has a flow channel in which the player
will be in an enjoyable state of flow. Outside this channel, the player will be
either bored or anxious. As the player's skills improvethat is, as the player
expands his or her repertoire-the game needs to provide harder challenges to
keep the player interested (figure 3.3 3). Ideally, this would give us a
complete description of the attraction of games, going from the formal
system of the game rules, to how different game rules can provide different
kinds of challenges, to the experience and enjoyment of the player.
Unfortunately, even though flow is a compelling angle on games, it does not
explain everything: David Myers (1992) has noted that the fascination with
mechanically repeating trivial tasks in some games contradicts flowrepetition should lead to boredom but does not always.
In fact, there are enjoyable aspects of games that cannot simply be
explained as challenges. Galaga (figure 3.34) (Namco 1981) provides the
player with many choices such as how aggressively to seek out diving
opponents and whether to risk a ship in order to get increased firepower.
These are not the only things going on: In the second picture, the player
faces a single remaining enemy exactly above the player's ship. There is no
conceivable argument against shooting this enemy. Thus parts of the
gameplay in Galaga consist of unchallenging choices, but these parts may
nevertheless be quite enjoyable. If we look at most other games, we may at
first glance accept the theory that all of them are based on interesting choices
and challenges, but a second look will reveal a lot of unchallenging moments
as well. However, something not challenging can still be a positive
experience-executing a plan; hitting the beat; performing the final kill; doing
a routine to perfection. The variation between challenges and lack of
challenge is one of the ways in which a game can modulate its intensity.
The flow channel (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 74).
This does not weaken the claim that challenges are a core aspect of the
enjoyability of a game; it simply points out that challenges can range widely,
and that the way in which they are created, their difficulty, and the order in
which they are presented to the player all contribute to the player's
subjective experience and enjoyment of different games. Consider the quite
special Playstation game of Vib-Ribbon (NaNaOn-Sha 1999) in figure 3.35.
In Vib-Ribbon, the player controls a character moving along a white line.
The object of the Vib-Ribbon is simply to hit the right buttons on the
Playstation controller at the correct time (in time with the beat). Various
shapes on the line correspond to specific buttons on the controller. Since the
only thing the player can do is to press the right button at the right time or
fail to do so, Vib-Ribbon does not contain any interesting choices
whatsoever. But it is still an enjoyable game. Performing the non-interesting
choices is augmented by another form of enjoyment, that of being in time
with the music. Vib-Ribbon is, of course, a game of skill or motor challenges
rather than strategy; the fun factor of Vib-Ribbon is connected to a larger,
primarily Asian, genre of music and rhythm games where the primary object
of the game is to be in time with the music. (The most famous of these
games is Dance Dance Revolution [Konami 2001]). This shows that we
cannot have one definitive description of what makes challenges enjoyable.
Even though all challenges likely produce some enjoyment when they are
overcome, different challenges can be enjoyable for other reasons as well.
Golago (Namco 1981): Most of the game is challenging,
but some situations are not challenging at all.
Vib-Ribbon (NaNaOn-Sha 1999).
The Conventions of Challenge Consistency
While nothing prevents a game from combining all imaginable kinds of
challenges, there is a convention that the challenges presented throughout a
game must have a similarity that allows the player to face them by refining
the same basic repertoire. Even if the real-time strategy game StarCraft
(Blizzard 1998) requires strategic planning as well as high-speed mouse
skills; and even if a game session goes through many different phases (from
buildup to expansion to large battles), there is a consistency in the game
where many basic methods such as building structures and units, creating
groups, and upgrading technology remain constant. A very small number of
games make an exception to this convention of consistency.
Some older game types contain a disused way of combining challenges by
having a number of completely independent screens that are part of the same
fictional world. Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware 1986) is basically a
strategy game with the overall goal of conquering England. This is achieved
by way of a number of very different minigames: jousting (first-person
perspective), raiding (fencing in 2-D perspective), and attacking castles
(controlling a catapult). It is only the fictional world that ties different minigames together; each mini-game calls for a special repertoire with little
connection to the repertoire needed for the other mini-games.
The ironic meta-game WarioWare Inc. (Nintendo 2003b) has a unique
twist in that it presents itself as a number of "bad" games supposedly
designed by various friends of Wario (Mario's evil cousin). WarioWare
consists of a number of utterly unrelated mini-games. Each mini-game lasts
less than ten seconds and is simply presented as a task that the player must
quickly figure out how to perform (figures 3.36-3.38). WarioWare contains
many of references to different games and game genres and the challenges
and repertoires that they contain. Playing WarioWare involves identifying
the challenge of a given game within a very short time frame, and the
repertoire needed to play it is a meta-repertoire of being able to identify
different game types and the methods needed for playing them. WarioWare
is unique in that it is a parody of video games. I point to these two games
because they-by their exception-highlight the convention that a game should
challenge the player in a consistent way.
Enjoying Rules
This has presented a general view of the rules of games, as well as a
description of different ways in which games can be structured by these
rules. It may still seem paradoxical that the rules of a game have to be
algorithmic and implementable without any ingenuity, yet the game
immediately becomes boring if the player has a complete strategy and can
thus play it without using any ingenuity. This is an effect of the quality that
the behavior of simple rules can be unpredictable and highly complex, and
thus a game can be easy to learn but difficult to master.
WorioWore (Nintendo 2003b): Catch the toast!
WarioWare: Pick the nose!
WarioWare: Brush the teeth!
In a game of emergence, the player is challenged because aspects of the
game-the rules and the game entities-continually influence each other. This
creates variation. Emergence in games makes interesting strategies possible,
but a dominant strategy may render a game uninteresting. Likewise,
micromanagement or too much low-level work may become uninteresting
when the player is thinking about strategy on a higher level. Most of the
interesting challenges of games require a continued refinement of the
player's repertoire.
In this chapter, I have examined rules from a number of different
perspectives. But this is what games are like: Games are an interaction
between the algorithmic game rules and the human players who often enjoy
themselves. Games are formal systems that provide informal experiences.
141
FICTION
While all games have rules, most video games also project a fictional world:
The player controls a character; the game takes place in a city, in a jungle, or
anywhere else. Such fictional game worlds, obviously, do not actually exist;
they are worlds that the game presents and the player imagines. The focus of
this chapter is what kind of worlds we find in games and how games cue
players into imagining worlds.
Rules and fiction compete for the player's attention. They are
complementary, but not symmetrical: Since all games have rules and since
rules are a distinct aspect of games, it was possible in the previous chapter to
discuss rules mostly without mentioning fiction. However, it is not possible
to deal with fiction in games without discussing rules. The fictional world of
a game is projected in a variety of ways-using graphics, sound, text,
advertising, the game manual, and the game rules. The way in which the
game objects behave also influences the fictional world that the game
projects. Though rules can function independent of fiction, fiction depends
on rules.
In chapter 3, we found that rules are designed to be objective, obligatory,
unambiguous, and generally above discussion. With fiction in games, we
find the opposite to be true: a strong part of the attraction of fiction in games
is that it is highly subjective, optional, ambiguous, and generally evocative
and subject to discussion. Rules and fiction are attractive for opposite
reasons.
Games project fictional worlds through a variety of different means, but
the fictional worlds are imagined by the player, and the player fills in any
gaps in the fictional world. Many games also present fictional worlds that
are optional for the player to imagine, and some present worlds that are
contradictory and incoherent.
Fiction is commonly confused with storytelling. I am using fiction to
mean any kind of imagined world, whereas, briefly stated, a story is a fixed
sequence of events that is presented (enacted or narrated) to a user. Herman
Melville's Moby Dick is a story and a fiction, whereas a painting such as
Georges Seurat's La Grandejatte is a fiction but not a story since it only
presents one moment in time. I will examine the question of games and
stories at the end of this chapter.
Fictional Worlds
What kinds of places are Norrath in EverQuest or the Black Mesa complex
in Half-Life (Valve Software 1998)? They are not fixed stories, but fictional
worlds. The theory of fictional worlds is derived from concept of possible
worlds in analytical philosophy. In its most basic form, "possible worlds can
be understood as abstract collections of states of affairs, distinct from the
statements describing those states" (Pavel 1986, 50). In fictional worlds,
there is an important distinction between the description of a fictional world
and the fictional world as it is actually imagined. The text of Hamlet directly
describes a rather small world, mostly a castle in Elsinore with some hints of
foreign countries. At the same time, the fictional world of Hamlet is
presumed to be as large and detailed as the actual world. The work not only
cues the reader to imagine the states of affairs described by the play, but also
to make inferences about the larger world of Hamlet on basis on the text.
Thus, the reader performs much work in order to imagine a fictional world,
and consequently different readers and game players will imagine a fictional
world differently.'
This is because all fictional worlds are incomplete. No fiction exists that
completely specifies all aspects of a fictional world: "For several writers,
incompleteness constitutes a major distinctive feature of fictional worlds.
About complete worlds, one can decide whether for any proposition p, either
p or its negation non -p is true in that world" (Pavel 1986, 107). They are
incomplete because is not possible to specify all the details about any world
(Pavel 1986, 75). For example, it is not possible to determine the number of
children that Lady Macbeth has-this is an undecidable question (Ryan 1992,
532-533). Any fictional world will be missing such pieces of information,
some of which will be filled in by the user, some of which will remain
subject to controversy: "The laws of nature that are not specifically
contradicted by the text belong to its worlds:... every child born in fiction
having been engendered by a human father, there is no reason to doubt this
regularity as long as the text signals no exception" (Pavel 1986, 105). In
most cases, the incompleteness of a fictional world leaves the user with a
number of choices in the imagining of the world. Marie-Laure Ryan has
proposed the principle of minimal departure, which states that when a piece
of information about the fictional world is not specified, we fill in the blanks
using our understanding of the actual world (Ryan 1991, 48-60). In a
specific genre, we fill in the missing pieces by using a combination of
knowledge of the real world and knowledge of genre conventions. In an
adventure tale, we fill in the blanks using a combination of knowledge of the
adventure genre and our knowledge of the real world, so although we have
no real-world experience with witches, we assume that a witch in an
adventure has magical powers.
Why Does Mario Have Three Lives?
Half-Life takes places in a world where a scientific experiment goes wrong
and an alien invasion ensues, but the fictional world of this a game is also
incomplete: Not much can be inferred about the outside world of HalfLife.
Likewise, we cannot deduct the technical details of the units in a game
strategy game and we do not know the names of Mario and Luigi's parents.
This does not prevent us from imagining such things, but the games do not
give much information to go by.
In addition to incomplete worlds, some games, and many video games,
present game worlds that are incoherent worlds,' where the game contradicts
itself or prevents the player from imagining a complete fictional world.'
Historically, the arcade game gave the player three lives before the game
was over. This is the case in Donkey Kong (Nintendo 1981), where we face
serious difficulties trying to imagine the world (figures 4.1-4.3).
The fictional world of Donkey Kong is only very superficially described,
but it is possible to imagine a world in which Mario's girlfriend is kidnapped
by an evil gorilla and has to be rescued. This is repeated on levels 1 and 2.
On level 3, Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario's girlfriend again and apparently
returns to the original hideout. It is harder to understand why Mario has three
lives: Being hit by a barrel, by a fireball, or by an anvil should reasonably be
fatal. Furthermore, the player is rewarded with an extra Mario at 10,000
points. This is not a question of Donkey Kong being incomplete, but a
question of the fictional world being incoherent or unimaginable. While,
technically, any world can be imagined, and we could explain Mario's
reappearance by appealing to magic or reincarnation, the point here is that
nothing in Donkey Kong suggests a world where people magically come
back to life after dying. In an informal survey of Donkey Kong players, all
players explained the three lives by appealing to the rules of the game: With
only one life, the game would be too hard.
Donkey Kong (Nintendo 1981): Girl abducted. Playing.
Hit by barrel. Hit by barrel again.
(continued)
I Figure 4.2 1
Success. Level 2: Abducted. Success. Abducted. Success.
(continued)
Level 4: Lifts. Hit by spring (?). Game over. Enter your
name.
I Figure 4.3 1
(continued)
This means that when we find it too hard to imagine a video game fiction,
we can resort to explaining the events in the game by appealing to the rules.
Mario is not reincarnated (fiction); the player just has three Marios (rules). If
the effort required to fill in a blank in the game world becomes too big, we
have to resort to a rule-oriented explanation. I propose that we call this type
of fictional world an incoherent world, meaning that there are many events
in the fictional world that we cannot explain without discussing the game
rules. Still, if we focus on the rules of the game, the experience of playing
Donkey Kong is not incoherent. This relation between rule coherence and
fictional world coherence is discussed in further detail in chapter 5.
From Abstract to Representational
There is a big difference between an abstract game and a modern video game
with an elaborate fictional world. It is tempting to describe games as being
either abstract or representational, but in The Oxford History of Board
Games, game scholar David Parlett rejects this as a distinction that we
cannot completely uphold. Different players will imagine different things
and some players will forget the representation and think in terms of rules:
"In short, no hard and fast distinction can be drawn between abstract and
representational as a classification of games. How representational a game is
depends on the level at which it is being played and the extent of its player's
imagination" (Parlett 1999, 6).
I completely agree with Parlett's argument that we cannot draw a hard
distinction between abstract and representational games, but it is
nevertheless an interesting area to explore, particularly the muddled ground
between abstract and representational games in terms of games as objects, in
terms of the player's experience of the games, and in the player's use of a
single game. So rather than dismissing the question, we can consider it in
greater detail:
• There are many abstract games, such as Tetris.
• There are many games that project fictional worlds, such as CounterStrike.
• A game like chess falls in a strange space in between: It is not abstract, but
neither is it entirely representational in the sense that it projects a world.
Chess represents a conflict between two societies, but most of the events in
chess are not comprehensible as descriptions of events in a fictional world.
How long time does it really take to move the pawn? Is chess about a
world where the queen moves eight times faster than the king? Therefore,
like Donkey Kong, chess is an incoherent world game-these are games that
project some kind of world, but where it is impossible or very difficult to
imagine a complete fictional world from the game, not because the world
is incomplete (all fictional worlds are), but because there are events in the
game that cannot be explained without referring to the game rules.
• A parallel type is the almost abstract game where the individual pieces have
iconic meaning-an example would be the standard deck of cards with its
kings and queens.
• Finally, some games are abstract, such as Denki Blocks (Denki Limited
2001) or Bust-A-Move (Taito 1998), which are based on a gameplay that is
abstract; in both cases the game is about connecting elements with the
same color, but they are also framed as being a contest against cute ingame characters (figure 4.4).
This leads us to a list of five main types of games:
1. Abstract games. An abstract game is a game that does not in its entirety
or in its individual pieces represent something else: The game of checkers is
a set of pieces that do not mean something else; the game is the rules. There
are some conventions around the shape of the pieces and the board, but they
do not stand for something else. Tetris is the bestknown abstract video game.
2. Iconic games. An iconic game is one whose individual parts have
iconic meaning: The king of hearts in the standard deck of cards suggests a
king; it is not clear what relation this king has to other kings in the deck of
cards or to other cards in the same suit. Presumably, the king and queen of
hearts are married and the jack is somehow part of the court, but it is hard to
take this any further.
Bust-A-Move (Taito 1998): The abstract game is
presented as being played between in-game characters.
3. Incoherent world games. An incoherent world game is a game with a
fictional world but where the game contradicts itself or some game events
cannot be explained as part of the fictional world. While in an incomplete
fictional world there are blanks that the player must fill in, an incoherent
world prevents the player from filling in the blanks. In the Donkey Kong
example, we cannot easily explain why Mario has three lives except by
referring to the rules of the game. Chess represents a conflict between two
societies at war, but it is not possible to explain the movements of the pieces
except by referring to the rules of the game.
4. Coherent world games. Some games contain coherent worlds, where
nothing prevents us from imagining them in any detail. Most adventure
games fall in this category.
5. Staged games. Staged games are a special case where an abstract or
somewhat representational game is played in a more elaborate world. These
are games like Denki Blocks or WarioWare Inc. where the simple puzzles
and games to be solved are presented as having been created by characters in
a very cursorily sketched larger world. A more complex variation is in the
ambitious role-playing/adventure Shenmue (Sega-AM2 2000) where the
protagonist can play games on in-game arcade machines. This can obviously
be done on any number of levels, but the major limitation seems to be that
you can only stage a game in a game with a fictional world. You can play an
abstract game against characters in a fictional world, but you cannot play
EverQuest inside Tetris. It is not that it is graphically impossible to place
EverQuest inside a game of Tetris; it is just that it does not make sense.
These categories can work on a purely textual level as well as in the mind
of the player: The player may fail to understand the representation, strongly
misinterpret the representation, fill out the inevitable holes in the
representation in idiosyncratic ways, or add an element of make-believe to
an abstract game. Arguably, many amateur sports are often played with some
fictional world element. The amateur soccer player may imagine that he is
David Beckham during the match, thus combining the abstract game with an
imagined, fictional world.
Likewise, any game can potentially be read as an allegory of something
else. Janet Murray has famously read Tetris like this: "a perfect enactment of
the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s-of the constant bombardment
of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our
overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the
next onslaught" (1997, 144). When we consider that Tetris is a Russian
game, Murray's reading does not say that Tetris was intended as a comment
on American lives or that Tetris is a comment on American lives, but only
that it is possible to make this allegorical reading. Any game can potentially
be read as an allegory of something else, but some readings will be more
convincing than others.
Ways of Creating Worlds
A game cues a player into imagining a fictional world. Games can do this in
a number of different ways: using graphics, sound, text, cut-scenes, the game
title, box, or manual, haptics,4 and rules. Additionally, the actions that the
player performs by moving a mouse, pressing a key on a keyboard, or using
a game controller signify actions in the game world: Pressing the mouse
button may signify shooting a gun; pushing the stick on the game controller
to the right may signify moving a character to the right in the game world.
Finally, personal idiosyncrasies and even rumors may influence the way a
player imagines the game world.
I Figure 4.5 1
EverQuest (Verant Interactive 1999).
Graphics
The most obvious way of projecting a world is by using graphics. In figure
4.5, the player faces a skeleton in EverQuest: The graphics project a world
with trees and skeleton monsters. Graphics are probably the most important
way in which games project worlds.
Sound
In the same example, the sound is less expressive but, certainly, the simple
noises played when the player is attacked also project a fictional game
world. In game development, fewer resources are usually spent on sound
than on graphics, and there is a tendency for sound in games to be mostly
mood-enhancing and not quite as informative than graphics.
Text
Ever Quest is something of a combination of the old and new, combining 3D graphics with the text-based MUD (multi-user dungeon) game of the
1980s. Consequently, much of the action is also described using text, as in
the previous EverQuest example: `A skeleton tries to hit YOU, but misses!"
Even though dialogue has traditionally been exclusively represented by text,
advancements in computer sound and storage have allowed it to be included
as audio as well. Nevertheless, the vast majority of games for current
handheld game systems rely on text for dialogue.
Cut-Scenes
A somewhat controversial way of creating game fiction,5 a cut-scene is a
non-interactive sequence of a game that typically provides backstory or
informs the player of the task to be undertaken (figure 4.6). Cut-scenes are
often considered problematic because they prevent the player from doing
anything and are in a sense a non-game element in a game. Still, they play an
important role in projecting fiction in modern video games.
Game Title, Box, and Manual
Several non-game elements can contribute to the projection of the game
world: The title of the game sometimes creates expectations about the
fictional world; for example, the title Space Invaders is by itself sufficient to
describe a science fiction setting with battling spaceships. The game box
usually features specially designed graphics rather than screenshots from a
game, as in the case of EverQuest in figure 4.7. The images on the boxscreenshots as well as specially designed graphics-cue the player into
imagining the fictional world of the game. It is also common for games to
provide some element of textual background story in the manual or on the
box.
Haptics
The least developed way of projecting fictional worlds is using the haptic
facilities of the controllers for modern consoles: The Playstation 2, Xbox,
and GameCube consoles' standard controllers can be programmed by games
to vibrate at specific times. At the current state of the art, this is, in my
opinion, not done very artfully, being mostly a default vibration that is
triggered when, for example, your car crashes in a racing game.
I Figure 4.6 1
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Konami 2001 b).
Rules
The rules of a game also contribute to the fictional world. Even if the
graphics were the same, the fictional world-skeleton of EverQuest would be
perceived quite differently if it never attacked the player, if it always ran
away, or if it was stronger or weaker. In this way, the rules work with the
representational layer of the game to project the game world. This is
explored in more detail in chapter 5.
Player Actions and Time
Since a player uses time and effort to play a game, that time and effort
acquire a dual meaning in a game with a fictional world. The actions that the
player performs also influence events in the fictional world, and the time
taken to play is projected onto the fictional time of the game world.
The EverQuestbox-
Rumors
Like other fictional worlds, the fictional world of a video game is
incompletely specified. But where the viewer of a film or the reader of a
novel is certain to have seen all the material that presents the fictional world
of the story, video games are special in that skill is required to access all
parts of the game. Video games are therefore uniquely prone to rumors and
imaginings about the world of a game. In the arcade game Battlezone (figure
4.8) (Atari 1980), the player controls a tank in a simple 3-D environment; a
mountain range and a volcano can be seen on the horizon. Atari engineer
Lyle Rain recalls: "One letter came from a Battlezone fan who said that if
you drove far enough you finally got to the volcano, and if you drove over
the top of the volcano, you could go down into the crater. And he said that
inside the crater there was a castle, and that you could go inside and explore
the castle. Of course, none of this was true" (qtd. in Burnham 2001, 216).
The game designer cannot control the player's interpretation of the game
world, and the player may additionally believe that the game contains
nonexistent elements and imagine the world accordingly. There is nothing in
Battlezone that indicates the existence of a castle, but this player
nevertheless believed that the game contained indications that he would find
if only he got sufficiently far into the game.6
I Figure 4.8 1
Bottlezone (Atari 1980).
Optional Worlds and Incoherent Worlds
If we play a game of Quake III Arena, we are invited to imagine a fictional
world where players can change directions in mid-air, and attack each other
using a wide range of futuristic weapons. However, we can also refuse the
invitation and still play the game. It is a common characteristic that with
sustained playing of the same game, the player may become less interested
in the representational/fictional level of the game and more focused on the
rules of the game. In a survey of Quake III Arena players, Retaux and
Rouchier (2002) discovered that Quake III Arena players were initially
attracted to the graphics of the game, but that as they played more, they
would modify the graphical settings on their machine to get higher frame
rates (and thereby faster feedback) at the expense of graphical detail: The
more experienced a player was, the less the graphics mattered. In figure 4.9a,
graphical detail is high and the game as a fictional world is therefore
emphasized, in figure 4.9b, graphical detail is low and the game as a set of
rules is therefore emphasized. Experienced players shift their focus from the
fictional world of the game to the game as a set of rules. This corresponds
with Haider and Frensch's theory of information reduction (1996) discussed
in chapter 3, about how improved performance includes learning to ignore
information that is not relevant to the performance of the task. This is
something that users generally do intuitively, and in this case they do it
explicitly by tweaking the options of the game: Skilled players know that the
textures on the wall are not relevant to the playing of the game.
Incoherent Worlds
An incoherent world is characterized by the fact that we cannot reasonably
fill in the gaps in the world. It is not easy to generalize about where the
border lies, but an informal test is the retelling test: For a given game, is it
possible to describe what really happened in the game without resorting to
describing the rules, props, or the real-world situation where the game was
played? In Donkey Kong, we are likely to simply refer to the game
convention that the player has three lives, rather than explain Mario's three
lives as an aspect of the fictional game world. The same applies to chess.
What we find is that small and local aspects of such games can be retold:
Each level and individual life in Donkey Kong can be retold; the
checkmating of a king can-with extraordinary leaps of imagination-be retold;
but a full session of an incoherent world game cannot be retold in its entirety
without describing the rules of the game or the real-world play situation.
Quake 111 Arena (ID Software 1999) with high and low
graphics detail (Retaux and Rouchier 2002).
I think the best explanation for incoherent world games is that by game
conventions, the player is aware that it is optional to imagine the fictional
world of the game. In non-electronic make-believe games, this makes perfect
sense since a game of make-believe is not required to be rhetorically
persuasive (nobody else needs to be convinced) nor does it need to be
logically coherent. We can agree to believe in the fiction, and we can agree
not to.
Time in Games
In Pavel's (1986) terms, make-believe is a dual structure where something in
the real world (primary universe) is assigned a place in a fictional world
(secondary universe). If we play a board game such as Axis & Allies (Nova
Game Design 1984), all our actions have a double meaning. We move a
piece around a board, but this also means we are invading Scandinavia with
our troops. In Tomb Raider (Core Design Ltd. 1996), we click the keys on
the keyboard, but we are also moving Lara Croft. In these examples, the
actions that we perform have the duality of being real events and being
assigned another meaning in a fictional world. Additionally, since our
actions take place in time, that time shares the duality of being both real time
and fictional world time. The fictional world of an incoherent game is
provisional, and we can examine this from a temporal perspective to see how
it works during the course of a game session: how a game can shift between
prompting the player to imagine a fictional world and preventing the player
from imagining the game world.
Here, I have chosen to examine time rather than space, as the time the
player uses to play a video game has an additional meaning in the fictional
world, whereas space in video games primarily exists inside the game world.
Chapter 5 contains a general discussion on space in games.7
Time in abstract games.
Time in Abstract Games
To play a game takes time. A game begins and it ends. I would like to call
this time play time. Play time denotes the time span taken to play a game. As
a first example, we may look at checkers. In abstract games like checkers or
Tetris it would seem that this is all there is to it: Everything in the game
happens now, while we play. In soccer-which is really just a physical
abstract game-the same thing would be true. To draw a diagram of time in
such a game is trivial (figure 4.10).
Games such as checkers, tennis, or Tetris do not cue the player into
imagining a fictional world, but all games contain a change of game state,
the movement from the initial state (the outcome has not been decided) to
another state (the outcome has been decided). As discussed in chapter 3, a
game is a state machine. When you play a game, you are interacting with the
game state. The difference between a real-time abstract game and a turnbased abstract game is that in the latter case the game state only changes
when the player takes a turn. In a real-time game, not doing anything also
has consequences. Additionally, turn-based games usually do not specify the
amount of play time that the player can use on a specific move (unless this is
specified by tournament rules or social pressure).
Real-time Games with Worlds
In a real-time game like Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament (Epic
MegaGames 1999), we experience the duality described above: As a player,
you are "yourself" and a character in the game world. I propose the term
fictional time 8 to denominate the time of the events in the game world. In
most action games and in the traditional arcade game, the play time-fictional
time relation is presented as being 1:1. In such real-time games, pressing the
fire key or moving the mouse immediately affects the game world.
Therefore, the game presents a parallel world, happening in real time (figure
4.11).
Real-time games: The play time has a 1:1 projection to the
game world's fictional time.
Other Games with Worlds
In the original SirCity and in SirCity 4 (Maxis 2003) in figure 4.12, we also
find play time and fictional time, but the events in the fictional time
(investing in infrastructure, building houses) happen faster than we would
expect them to. Fictional time depends on explicit marks, such as dates, and
on cultural assumptions about the duration of the game events. SimCity has
both: We know that building a power plant takes more than a few seconds,
and the interface displays the current date of the fictional time. Playing for
two minutes can make a year pass in the fictional time/game world (figure
4.13).
Projection
The link between play time and fictional time can be described as projection.
Projection means that the player's time and actions are projected onto the
game world where they take on a fictional meaning. The arrows of the
figures correspond to a basic sense of now when playing a game. Games
require at least one situation where the player interacts with the game state,
and games that are not abstract also require at least one instance of
projection-one instance where the player performs some act such as moving
a piece on a board or pressing a key on a keyboard, and where this act is
projected as having a specific meaning in the fictional world.
As described, action games tend to have a 1:1 projection of the play time
to the fictional time. In some games such as Shogun: Total War (Creative
Assembly 2000), or The Sims, the player can select the game speed, thus
specifying the relation between play time and fictional time.' The play time
is projected in to the fictional time with a specific speed, determining how a
period in play time will translate to fictional time.
SimCity 4 (Maxis 2003): Building a power plant in a few
seconds.
A fictional time of a year takes a few minutes of play time.
There is one extra aspect of the projection itself, since many games claim
to depict historical events. Axis & Allies, about World War II, may be a good
example, as well as Age of Empires II (Ensemble Studios 1999). In these
games, the fictional time is placed in a specific historical period. It is
perfectly possible to play a real-time game that takes place in
fifteenthcentury France or in space in the thirty-second century. This can be
something determined as simply as using text on the box, "The year is
3133," or it can be something the player deduces from the game setting. The
year specification in SimCity serves the same purpose. The play time can be
projected onto fictional time with a specific speed and it can be placed
historically.
Modern Game with Cut-Scenes
Not all fictional time is projected from play time: It is quite common for
contemporary video games to contain intro-sequences and cut-scenes. As an
example, consider the sequence from American McGee's Alice (Rogue
Entertainment 2000) in figures 4.14-4.16. This single-player game is a
mission-based real-time game where each mission is framed by cut-scenes.
Cut-scenes depict events in fictional time (in the game world). Cut-scenes
are not a parallel time or an extra level, but a different way of projecting the
fictional time. They do not by themselves modify the game state-this is why
they can usually be skipped and why the user cannot do anything during a
cut-scene. While play time is projected to fictional time in interactive
sequences, cut-scenes disconnect play time from fictional time (figure 4.17).
American McGee's Alice (Rogue Entertainment 2000).
Navigating the game world.
Having traversed a part of the game world, the player is
rewarded with a cut-scene, which gives information about
the next task.
Navigating the game world in search of the promised
concoction.
Alternation between play time being a prop for fictional
time and fictional time being narrated by cut-scenes.
The Chronology of Time in Games
Notwithstanding inspirations from cinema, time in games is almost always
chronological, and there are several reasons for this. Flash-forwards are
highly problematic, since to describe events-to-come would mean that the
player's actions did not really matter." Using cut-scenes or in-game artifacts,
it is possible to describe events that led to the current fictional time, but an
interactive flashback leads to the time machine problem: The player's actions
in the past may suddenly render the present impossible." This is the reason
why time in games is almost always chronological. 12
Game objects may bring information about earlier events.
One of the more interesting developments in recent years is that game
designers have become better at creating games where objects in the game
world point to past events. Modern adventure games tend to contain not only
cut-scenes, but also artifacts in the game world (fictional time) that tell the
player what happened at a previous point in fictional time. This is the basic
detective game model. In Myst (Cyan 1993), books in the game world
inform the player of events that happened prior to the time of the playing, or
at least outside the time that you can interact with (figure 4.18).
Adventure and Pong: Coherent Time versus Level Time
Many, especially newer, games are careful to craft fictional time as
continuous, creating a believable world. Half-Life is a coherent world game
(figure 4.19). When the game needs to load new data, this is indicated by the
word "loading." This creates a continuous fictional time, but disconnects
play time (figure 4.20). This is logically the case in all coherentworld games,
where the game only presents one coherent world and one coherent time, but
many games are imprecise with fictional time. In the classic arcade game,
the changing of levels has no logic in the game world: Arcade games tend to
present several ontologically separate worlds that simply replace one another
without indicating any connection. One way to soothe the passage between
two levels is, of course, to use cut-scenes. One of the earliest examples of
this can be found in Pengo (figure 4.21) (Sega 1982). This cut-scene does
not actually make sense: It does not mean that something happens in the
game world, so Pengo is therefore an incoherent world game. The cut-scene
rather presents a break between two separate worlds in the game, thus
breaking the timeline of both play time and fictional time. Here, play time is
not projected onto fictional time, and there is no connection between the
fictional time of the previous level and the upcoming level (figure 4.22).
Pengo is an incoherent world game, but the individual levels are coherent.
Similarly, in newer games like Battlefield 1942 or Counter-Strike, the jump
between different rounds is not explained.
Half-Life (Valve Software 1998). Paused while loading.
Moving through the game, play time is paused while
loading.
Pengo (Sega 1982): After level two, penguins dance to
Beethoven's An Die Freude.
Changing level, both play time and fictional time are
undefined.
This kind of abrupt jump can seem unwarranted, but can incoherent
worlds in games be understood by way of their time? When we con sider this
historically, Space Invaders also features several levels: Having destroyed all
the advancing aliens, the player is presented with an unexplained new wave
of aliens.
The popularity of this kind of incoherent time may be due to the early
history of video games. Pong presents itself as table tennis, and each session
is played with several balls. It is structured like a meta-game consisting of
separate rounds, but it makes sense here-this is, in fact, just like table tennis.
Space Invaders borrows the concept of rounds and projects a fictional world.
Incoherent round-based worlds seem connected to the rounds found in sports
and other pre-electronic games. The rounds make sense on the rule-level, as
an activity in play time, but not in the fictional world and time.
Broken Time: Standard Violations of Game Time
In addition to the lack of connection between levels in some games, there are
a few standard violations of the play time/fictional time relationship. Since
play time is projected onto fictional time, pausing the play time should
logically also pause the fictional time and hence the fictional world. A
common violation of this principle regards sound: In Black ds' White
(Lionhead Studios 2001), the environmental sounds continue playing when
the game is paused. In The Sims, the CD player purchased for the game's
inhabitants continues to play when the game is paused. This breaks the logic
of game time, and it signals that the sound is in some way not part of the
game world at all. The film theorist David Bordwell makes a distinction
between diegetic space-the fictional world-and nondiegetic space-that which
is not part of the fictional world (in the same way that the musical score is
external to the fictional world of a movie) (Bordwell 1985, 118-120). The
sounds that continue even when the game world is paused keep the player
"in the mood" of the world, even though the world is technically paused.
Another type of subtle breach of game time logic is when it is unclear
whether the actions of the game are real-time events-in play time-or if they
refer to the fictional time of the game. In the soccer game FIFA 2002 the onscreen clock counts forty-five minutes for each half, signifying a full-length
soccer match. In real time each half lasts four minutes, a speed-up of 11.25
times. Since the clock shows the duration of a normal soccer match, it
follows that the action on the playing field is also 11.25 times faster than real
life. Subjectively, the game action appears quite fast, but if our point of
reference is the game clock, the action in the game is painfully slow. In
figure 4.23, the normally agile David Beckham takes an amazingly slow
twelve seconds according to the clock to run the few meters from the edge of
the goal zone to the point from where he shoots. In play time, this takes a
more reasonable one second. But how long did it take in the time of the
game world, in fictional time? We cannot determine this in any definite way:
The fictional time of the game flickers between being a real-time game of 2
x 4 minutes and an imagined full-length soccer match of 2 x 45 minutes.
A more explicit version of incoherent time can be found in Grand Theft
Auto M. According to the in-game clock, the fictional time in the game runs
sixty times faster than the play time. (An hour of fictional time lasts one
minute in play time.) Like in the example of FIFA 2002, most of the events
within the game appear nevertheless to proceed at real-time speeds. The cars
drive fairly fast, but they are excruciatingly slow in fictional time. Many of
the tasks and missions that the player has to perform have to be completed
within a time limit in play time. In the taxi mission in figures 4.24-4.25, the
player has forty-nine seconds in real time to deliver the passenger to his
destination. According to the clock stating the time of day (at the top of the
screen), the journey took twenty minutes, but according to the clock stating
the time taken to deliver the passenger, the journey took twenty seconds.
While the overall picture is clear, namely that the top clock refers to the
fictional time, and the bottom clock refers to play time, this makes it
impossible to decide how long time passed in the game world-like in FIFA,
the fictional time of the game world is incoherent. While this may be
surprising, it is even more surprising that this broken time goes
unmentioned-the Gamespot.com review (Gerstman 2001) does not discuss it,
which suggests how common it is for games to have incoherent fictional
worlds.
A World Standing Still: Subjective Time?
There are situations in which the time of a game acquires a subjective
quality. In Space Invaders, the whole game is paused slightly whenever the
player hits an alien (figure 4.26). The moment of success for the player is
extended by a slight pause. We find the same occurrence in a number of
other games, mostly platform games like Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 1996) or
Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo 2002). If this is not experienced as a
jarring incoherence, it is likely due to the fact that the player is occupied
with the enjoyment of his or her accomplishment, and because challenges
influence the subjective experience of time (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 6667).
In film, slow motion is a well known device for signaling that a moment in
time has strong emotional significance.
FIFA 2002 (Electronic Arts 2002): David Beckham sprints
to the goal area. 12 seconds later, he is ready to shoot.
Grand Theft Auto 111 (Rockstar Games 2001): The
passenger is waiting.
Grand Theft Auto ///:Two clocks at the same time.
Space Invaders (Taito 1977): Time is paused briefly when
an alien is hit.
The Experience of Time
How does the player experience the duration of the game? The objective,
linear time described in the game time model feeds subjective time
experiences. The experience is a product of both the play time-fictional time
relation, and of the challenges that the rules present to the player. Games are
supposed to be enjoyable experiences, but this is obviously not always the
case. There are moments that have been described as dead time: Dead time is
when you have to perform unchallenging activities for the sake of a higher
goal. For example, to progress in EverQuest or Ultima Online (Origin
Systems 1997), you must spend hours or days doing mundane tasks such as
walking, waiting for monsters to respawn, or even fishing or chopping wood.
It makes perfect sense within the context of the game world but it is a dull
experience because the player's repertoire is not expanded or challenged-this
is the dead time. A specific task has to be performed to advance in the game,
but the task in itself holds no interest.
Games and Narratives
I have so far mostly refrained from discussing games and narratives, but the
focus on fictional time in games makes it necessary to describe this in more
detail. The primary predicament with such a discussion is that the term
narrative has such a wide range of contradictory meanings and associations
for different people and in different theories that it is practically meaningless
unless specified in great detail. I have previously expressed my frustration
with indiscriminate use of the term narrative:
The narrative turn of the last 20 years has seen the concept of narrative
emerge as a privileged master concept in the description of all aspects of
human society and sign-production. Expanding a concept can in many cases
be useful, but the expansion process is also one that blurs boundaries and
muddles concepts, be this desirable or not. With any sufficiently broad
definition of x, everything will be x. This rapidly expands the possible uses
of a theory but also brings the danger of exhaustion, the kind of exhaustion
that eventually closes departments and feeds indifference: Having
established that everything is x, there is nothing else to do than to repeat the
statement. (Juul 2001a)
This is not to say that we cannot discuss narrative, but to emphasize that our
interest is in concepts rather than words. Let me point to six different
meanings of narrative:
1. Narrative as the presentation of a number of events. This is the original
and literal meaning of the word: storytelling (Bordwell 1985; Chatman
1978).
2. Narrative as a fixed and predetermined sequence of events (Brooks [1984]
1992).
3. Narrative as a specific type of sequence of events13 (Prince 1987).
4. Narrative as a specific type of theme-humans or anthropomorphic
entities14 (Grodal 1997).
5. Narrative as any kind of setting or fictional world (Jenkins 2003).
6. Narrative as the way we make sense of the world (Schank and Abelson
1977).
This list allows us to escape the simple question of whether games are
narrative or not. Using the tools created so far for describing how games are
structured and what kinds of fictional worlds they create, we can make a
straightforward comparison of video games and narrative (table 4.1).
In a 2001 article, I argued that while a novel based on Star Wars will tell a
story that is recognizable from the movie, the Star Wars video game (Atari
1983) does not (Juul 2001a). Henry Jenkins disagrees on this point:
Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests, "you clearly can't
deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," whereas a film
version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot. This is
a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we
inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each
individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a
larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply retell the
story of Star Wars, but it doesn't have to in order to enrich or expand our
experience of the Star Wars saga. (Jenkins 2004, 124)
My argument used definitions one and two of narrative as the presentation of
a fixed sequence of events. Jenkins focuses on the fifth definition of
narrative as well as taking the perspective of the broader media landscape.
My article discusses the differences between video game and movies. Henry
Jenkins emphasizes that both play a role in a broader media ecology. This
does not seem to be an actual disagreement.
Most of the writers critical of applying narrative theory to games have
focused on the first, second, and third definitions of narrative, whereas
writers emphasizing similarities between games and narratives have focused
on the fifth and sixth. Are games narrative? The answer depends exclusively
on which meaning of "narrative" we are using and what aspects of games we
are focusing on.
Emergent Narrative and Player Story?
The term emergent narrative or player story calls for a special discussion.
Emergent narrative tends to be described very loosely15 as the player's
experience of the game (Pearce 2004), or the stories that the players can tell
about the game, or, perhaps, the stories that players can create using the
game. As Jenkins has explained: "Emergent narratives are not prestructured
or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as
unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself.... Most players come away
from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative
satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities,
where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing
the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict" (2004, 128). Since any
emergent game as defined in the previous chapter is neither pre-structured
nor as chaotic as life itself, this is not much of a criterion. Emergent
narrative tends to be associated with games like The Sims or EverQuest.
This seems to be an association with narrative as described in definition four,
as a type of fictional world where the events contain much human
interaction: in The Sims because the focus is on the interaction between a
small group of people; in EverQuest because the gameplay often involves
playing in groups or guilds. As long as it is not specified, emergent narrative
is a nearly meaningless term, but it does point out the fact that the content of
some games are thematically closer to traditional narratives than others.
Table 4.1
Video games and six definitions of narrative
Time in Games versus Time in Narratives
My two-level description of time in games as play time and fictional time is
in some ways parallel to the traditional narratological distinction between
story and discourse. A narrative consists of two distinct levels:
• Story, denoting the events told, in the order in which they were described
as having occurred.
• Discourse, denoting the telling of events, in the order in which they are
told. This is the narrative as a sequence of signs, be it words or shots in a
movie.
To read a novel or to watch a movie largely consists of reconstructing a story
on the basis of the discourse presented (Chatman 1978). In Orson Welles's
movie Citizen Kane (1941), the first scene shows the protagonist on his
deathbed. Then the movie cuts back in time to the beginning of the story.
This means that when watching Citizen Kane, we reconstruct the timeline of
the story even though the events are presented to us in achro- nological order
(figure 4.27).
Narratives: The discourse presents the story, but often
achronologically.
In my description of time in games, play time is comparable to discourse
time, and fictional time is comparable to story time. In both cases, the user
uses some real time to comprehend a fictional time. There are five crucial
differences: (1) The fictional time is not predetermined when the player
plays the game. (2) Games tend to be chronological. (A flashforward
generally means that the outcome of the game is determined, and hence is
not a game, whereas an interactive flashback can render the present
impossible if the player fails to complete a task.) A story is a predetermined
sequence, and users are aware of this in their reception of the game/story. (3)
The actions of the player have a dual quality of occurring in play time and
also being assigned meaning in the fictional world, thus the connection
between the play time and the fictional time in a game is more direct than
the connection between story and discourse. (4) Abstract games do not have
a fictional time, and therefore have only one level. (5) Games often project
incoherent worlds that cannot be described using a coherent timeline.
The Player and the Fictional World
In the world of storytelling, film and novels are largely about humans (or
anthropomorphic things) that the viewer/reader identifies with. Stories
without anthropomorphic actors are generally considered uninteresting
(Grodal 1997), but abstract games have no human or anthropomorphic
actors. If games were simply storytelling media, this would be radically
uninteresting. The interest of the rules themselves is the reason why games
can be abstract and without points of identification and yet be interesting. In
a game, the real-world player works to overcome challenges, and
overcoming them is considered a positive experience. The goal in the
fictional world must mimic the player's real-world situation by being
emotionally positive as well. For example, it is hard to imagine an Anna
Karenina game based on Tolstoy's novel where the goal of the player is to
commit suicide by throwing his or her character under a train (Ryan 2001a).
The goal has to be one that the player would conceivably want to attain.
Likewise, consider this hypothetical advertisement for a game based on
Hamlet: "Your father has been murdered! With much effort, fail to avenge
him and die a meaningless death!" This relates to the player association
described in the game definition. Superficially, it would seem that the player
is only attached to the outcome on the level of the rules, and as such, it
would be irrelevant whether the goal of the game is to commit suicide or to
save the universe. Yet, players undoubtedly also want to be able to identify
with the fictional protagonist and the goal of the game in the fictional world,
and hence the fictional world is very important to the player's motivation.
The relation between the player and the protagonist is often discussed as
identification (Walker 2001).
This does not rule out ironies, but most examples work by putting the
player in an active position where he or she must do things normally
considered negative: destroying houses and killing people in Rampage
(Bally Midway 1986), and killing pedestrians in Death Race (Exidy 1976)
and Carmageddon (Sales Curve Interactive 1997). 16 It is hard to create a
tragic video game-tragedies are about events beyond our control that are
then transformed into something more meaningful through the tragedy, but
games are mostly about having power and overcoming challenges. A bad
game is one in which the player dies without being able to prevent it. This is
not to say that it cannot be done, but just that there are some inherent
problems in the game format that makes creating tragic games difficult.
Burnout 2: Point of Impact (Criterion Studios 2002), discussed in chapter 5,
is one of the only video games where the player has to seek out personal
destruction-but this is presented in a depersonalized way, as a game of
disconnected rounds.
Fiction in Games
Games have their roots in rules and play time, and this allows them to define
their worlds much more loosely and less coherently than we would accept in
most other cultural forms. At the same time, the continued developments in
processing power and data storage make it possible to craft fictional worlds
with increasing detail and precision. While video games are also games, they
have several unique strengths that support the projection of fictional worlds:
• Since the rules of a video game are automated, video games allow for rules
that are more complex and hence for more detailed fictional worlds.
• Since the rules are hidden from the player, video games allow the player's
initial focus to be on the appearance of the game as a fictional world,
rather than on the game as a set of rules.
• Because video games are immaterial, they can depict fictional worlds more
easily than non-electronic games.
Recent video games provide more elaborate worlds than previous games
and, often, more coherent worlds. In combination with the improvements in
computer graphics and storage, this results in an increased emphasis on
game fiction. Conversely, contemporary games give the player more
freedom in his or her use of the game: The player no longer has three lives,
but can continue or even save the game; developers publish semi-official
cheat codes for their games; players can set up the games the way they want.
These are two movements in opposite directions: One is aimed at creating
more coherent worlds on their own terms; the other is aimed at paying more
heed to the real-world player by providing difficulty settings, retries, and/or
cheat codes.
Video games project incomplete and sometimes incoherent worlds. Game
fiction is ambiguous, optional, and imagined by the player in uncontrollable
and unpredictable ways, but the emphasis on fictional worlds may be the
strongest innovation of the video game.
RULES AND FICTION
Rules and fiction interact, compete, and complement each other. A video game may project a
world and the game may be played in only a part of this fictional world. Examining a number
of game examples in detail, it turns out that fiction in video games plays an important role in
making the player understand the rules of the game. A statement about a fictional character in
a game is half-real, since it may describe both a fictional entity and the actual rules of a
game.
In the game design process, the game designer must select which aspects of the fictional
world to actually implement in the game rules. The player then experiences the game as a
two-way process where the fiction of the game cues him or her into understanding the rules
of the game, and, again, the rules can cue the player to imagine the fictional world of the
game.
Rules and fictions can rarely match completely; there are many examples of jarring
mismatches between them. It is therefore tempting to describe their relation as inherently
problematic, but when rules and fictions do not match perfectly it can still generate a positive
effect, working as a way of playing with the player's expectations, as a way of creating
parody, and finally as a way of foregrounding the game as a real-world activity.
However, space in games is a special case. The level design of a game world can present a
fictional world and determine what players can and cannot do at the same time. In this way,
space in games can work as a combination of rules and fiction.
With the ideas developed throughout the book, I will finally consider what a game means.
World Space and Game Space
In the introduction, I mentioned Roger Caillois's empirically incorrect claim that games are
either ruled or make-believe. Let us revisit his argument:
Despite the assertion's paradoxical character, I will state that in this instance the fiction, the
sentiment of as if replaces and performs the same function as do rules. Rules themselves
create fictions. The one who plays chess, prisoner's base, polo, or baccara, by the very fact of
complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity
that literally corresponds to any of these games. That is why chess, prisoner's base, polo, and
baccara are played for real. As if is not necessary. (Caillois 1961, 8)
While his conclusion is incorrect, Caillois does point to an interesting similarity between
rules and fiction in that both contain an element of separation from the rest of the world.
Rules separate the game from the rest of the world by carving out an area where the rules
apply; fiction projects a world different from the real world. The space of a game is part of
the world in which it is played, but the space of a fiction is outside the world from which it is
created.
Building on Johan Huizinga, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have used the term magic
circle to describe the border between the context in which a game is played and what is
outside that context: "The term is used here as shorthand for the idea of a special place in
time and space created by a game.... As a closed circle, the space it circumscribes is enclosed
and separate from the real world.... In a very basic sense, the magic circle is where the game
takes place" (2004, 95). Soccer is played within a designated playing field; a board game
only takes place on the board. This can be expanded to provide a more general description of
the relation between the space in which a game is played and the space of the world around
it. In sports or board games, the game space is a subset of the space of the world: The space
in which the game takes place is a subset of the larger world, and a magic circle delineates
the bounds of the game (figure 5.1). When a ball game has a rule prescribing that the game
stops if the ball leaves the playing field, this relates to the border between game space and
world space. But in video games, the magic circle is quite well defined since a video game
only takes place on the screen and using the input devices (mouse, keyboard, controllers),
rather than in the rest of the world; hence there is no "ball" that can be out of bounds.'
A physical game (such as soccer): The game space is a subset of the
space of the real world.
In a computerized soccer game such as FIFA 2002, the game is delineated by the screen
and input devices, but the game itself projects a fictional world quite similar to the real world
of FIFA world cups, inside which a game space is delineated by a magic circle and a soccer
game is played (figure 5.2). This is typical of sports adapted to video games (and many other
video games): A fictional world is projected and a game is played in a part of that fictional
world. Since it adds meaning to a game to place it inside a larger fictional world, this is a
common way of constructing a game. The simplest setup is to claim that the series of rounds
that make up the individual game are part of a tournament. This is the case in Unreal
Tournament and Tekken 4 (Namco 2002). The relationship between game space and world
space becomes more interesting in games with more elaborate fictional worlds, where the
end of the game space has to be marked in more subtle ways than by using a white line or a
wall. In Battlefield 1942, the player approaching the edge of the game space is informed by a
textual message, "Warning! You are leaving combat area. Deserters will be shot. " This is
known as invisible walls: The fiction gives no clue that the world ends, but for no apparent
reason, the game space ends. When the game magazine Edge reviewed Shigeru Miyamoto's
game Super Mario Sunshine, disappointment was high since the game in this area fell short
of its predecessor, Super Mario 64:
FIFA 2002 projects a fictional world, with a playing field on which
soccer is played.
[In Super Mario 64] There was always somewhere to go, always something to do; levels
thrilled and baffled in equal measure; there were tiny polished touches that you might not
discover for days, months, years. So lucid and solid, too. No obvious invisible walls.
Sunshine begins on an island, and the island is surrounded by invisible walls. There are
more around the island's central hub, the town and in each of the seven worlds that lead off it.
That is disconcerting, unnerving in the follow-up to a game that used coherence as one of its
central tenets. (Edge 2002, 80)
It is a hallmark of a coherent world game that the bounds of the game space are reasonably
motivated by the fictional world: Grand Theft Auto III has a very elegant solution, where the
player is initially stuck on an island whose bridge to the mainland was destroyed when the
player was freed from a prison transport in the beginning of the game. It is only when the
player has solved a number of tasks that the bridge is reopened and the second and third
islands become accessible.
One type of incoherent world game is the game with several rounds which have no clear
connection. This covers Pengo (chapter 4) and the newer game of Counter-Strike where two
teams compete in a number of ontologically unconnected fictional worlds. In these games,
the magic circle is inverted, and the space in which the game is played becomes larger than
the space of the world in which it is played. The entire game becomes a superset of world
space, and a series of fictional world spaces with magic circles inside are created and deleted
during the course of the game.
Half-Real Games
In addition to containing a fictional space, the fictional world also influences the players'
understanding of the game rules. Let us examine the following statement: "Hamlet is Prince
of Denmark." It is a philosophical problem whether this statement is true or not (Pavel 1985,
13-17). On the one hand, there is no real person called Hamlet who is Prince of Denmark. On
the other hand, it is more correct to say that Hamlet is Prince of Denmark than to say that he
works as a banker. That is, Shakespeare's play describes a fictional world that does not
actually exist, but in which there is a character by the name of Hamlet who is Prince of
Denmark. "Hamlet is Prince of Denmark" is true in the fictional world that the play creates,
and we normally accept the statement "Hamlet is Prince of Denmark" because we take it to
refer to the possible world of the play. Now consider this statement: "Tennis is a game where
two people hit a ball using a racket." This statement is true in the normal sense: It is about the
real world, and it describes how the game of tennis is actually played. Let us then look at a
computer game, Tetris, in figure 5.3. We can make the following statement about Tetris: "In
Tetris, when you have covered an entire row, it disappears." This is a statement about the real
world much like the previous statement about tennis. The rules of Tetris are not physical but
programmed; but this does not change the fact that it is a verifiable statement about the real
world. Looking at Tekken 3 (figure 5.4), a game that is not abstract, consider the statement:
"Eddy Gordo is Brazilian and fights using the martial art of capoeira." Is this true? In this
case, we have to combine the question about Hamlet with the question about the rules of
tennis:
1. There is no real-world person called Eddy Gordo, but in the fictional world of Tekken 3,
there is a person by the name of Eddy Gordo who fights using the martial art of capoeira.
Tetris (Atari 1986).
2. And: In the real world, it is factually true that you can choose Eddy in Tekken 3, and that
you can control the character of Eddy so that he attacks his opponent using capoeira
moves.
The first point looks at Tekken 3 as fiction; the second point looks at Tekken 3 as real
activity. The description of the fictional character of Eddy also describes the real-world fact
that having selected that character in Tekken 3 gives the player the option of performing a
number of special moves. That Eddy Gordo fights using capoeira moves describes the
fictional world of the game, and it describes the real rules of the game.
The fictional world of a game strongly depends on the real world in order to exist, and the
fictional world cues the player into making assumptions about the real world in which the
player plays a game.
I Figure 5.4 1
Tekken 3 (Namco 2000): Eddy Gordo fights using capoeira.
Implementing a Fictional World: Stylized Simulations
On a basic level, a game with a fictional world can be seen as a simulation, as the
implementation of a fictional world in the rules of a game. A racing game is a simulation of
racing; FIFA 2002 is a simulation of soccer. Simulation can have varying degrees of fidelity
to what is being simulated.' Tekken 3 simulates fighting in general and capoeira with the
character of Eddy. A practitioner of capoeira, however, would undoubtedly feel that the game
was an extreme simplification. Countless moves have been omitted, and the available moves
have been simplified and are only available as either/or options: perform a handstand or do
not perform a handstand. Here, capoeira has lost much of its expressive potential. Tekken 3 is
a very imprecise and low-fidelity simulation of capoeira.
If we assumed that the quality of a game hinged on its degree of realism and the detail of
its simulation of the real world, this would be a serious detriment to the experience of playing
Tekken 3. Another example of a low-fidelity simulation is when the player enters a car in
Grand Theft Auto III. Simply being near the car and pressing A on the Playstation 2
controller makes the protagonist run to the nearest car door, open the door, remove any
person in the car, get in, and close the door. This is also a very low-fidelity simulation: In real
life, we can enter a car in any number of different ways. But unlike in the capoeira example,
we are unlikely to feel any significant loss here, since entering a car is generally not
considered a very interesting activity. Simplification and stylization can be found in most
games with fictional worlds. The player cannot lie down, do handstands, or simply leave the
playing field in FIFA 2002 or Virtua Tennis. Game fictions and rules are not perfect and
complete simulations of the real world; they are flickering and provisional by nature. But
stylization is an expressive device that games can use.
In his seminal book, Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud demonstrates the
expressiveness of simplification in comics (figure 5.5). The drawing of the cup in McCloud's
example represents not as much a cup as the idea of a cup. By removing detail, the comic
appears closer to the world of concepts than to the minute details of the real world. This
provides a more positive account of what simplification provides: By removing detail from
the source domain, the game focuses on a specific idea of what the game is about such as
capoeira, soccer, tennis, driving cars. A game does not as much attempt to implement the real
world activity as it attempts to implement a specific stylized concept of a real-world activity.
The tennis and soccer games implement only what are considered interesting core parts of
the real-world game; since entering a car is ultimately an uninteresting detail in the larger
world of Grand Theft Auto III, the simulation of that activity is reduced to the pressing of one
button.
Even though the actual design and development of a game are also subject to financial
and time constraints, this goes to show how games are often stylized simulations; developed
not just for fidelity to their source domain, but for aesthetic purposes. These are adaptations
of elements of the real world. The simulation is oriented toward the perceived interesting
aspects of soccer, tennis, or being a criminal in a contemporary city. In the case of sports
games, the fact that sports are typically experienced on television also shapes the game: Most
sports games contain slow-motion replays of the most dramatic moments in the game. The
stylization of a simulation is, of course, a subjective art that must take into account common
perceptions of whatever domain is being simulated.' Virtua Tennis simulates lobs, smashes,
and other dramatic aspects of tennis, whereas tennis elbow and broken rackets are omitted. In
many strategy games, humans pop into existence within a few seconds; in Age of Empires II,
a villager can be created at the click of a button (figure 5.6).
To Win the Sword Fight, Solve the Puzzle: Difficulty Metaphors
Many aspects of computer-based games are not just simplifications of realworld activity, but
something quite different. In the tennis game Top Spin (Power and Magic 2004), a perfect
serve must be performed by pressing the front right controller button and releasing it at the
precise time when the bouncing yellow mark is in the middle of the serve indicator (figure
5.7). What is the connection between serving in real tennis, throwing the ball into the air,
twisting your body to achieve maximum power while retaining enough control to direct the
ball to the right position on the other side of the net, and pressing and releasing the front right
button on the Xbox controller at the right moment? The basic answer seems to be that both
tasks are difficult: instead of performing a serve by mimicking the actual tennis activity, the
serve has been replaced by another difficult task. The video game activity is a metaphor for
the tennis activity. Puzzle Pirates (Three Rings Design 2003) works explicitly with this type
of metaphorical substitution. Challenging another player to a sword duel leads to a twoplayer duel in a puzzle game. This is a duel of sorts, but the activity bears no relation to what
the fictional setting of the game would lead us to expect. Likewise, when being on board a
ship, the task of bilge pumping turns out to be the playing of another action puzzle (figure
5.8).
Age of Empires 2 (Ensemble Studios 1999): Create a villager by
clicking a button.
Puzzle Pirates stands out because it foregrounds how video games often substitute one
difficult task for another. Again, this does not mean that the in-game fictional task is always
replaced by arbitrary real-world tasks that the player has to perform. It simply means that in
games that emphasize a fictional world, there has to be a metaphorical substitution between
the player's real-world activity and the in-game activity performed.
I Figure 5.7 1
Top Spin (Power and Magic 2004): Release the button when the
yellow bar is in the middle to perform a perfect serve.
Puzzle Pirates (Three Rings Design 2003): A sword fight using a
puzzle.
Fiction Cuing Rules and Rules Cuing Fiction
While the design of a game can work by choosing a domain or fictional setting and then
subjectively designing rules to implement that domain, the player of a video game
experiences this in an inverted way, where the representation and fictional world presented
by the game cue the player into making assumptions about the rules of the game. In a
computerized soccer game, the fictional world of the game will cue the player to assume that
the game implements whatever concept the player has of soccer, including the normal soccer
rules. An object that looks like a car is likely to be drivable. The even marginally experienced
player is additionally likely to be aware that some aspects of the fictional world may not be
implemented in the rules, and that generally the rules of a game are selective stylizations of
the domain they are supposed to simulate. As such, the player is unlikely to expect to be able
to leave the playing field in FIFA 2002 or to disassemble a car for spare parts in Grand Theft
Auto III. Only selected aspects of our assumptions about the fictional world are actually
implemented in the game: The player does not have to eat; the car never runs out of gas.4
The vast majority of video games present fictional worlds in one way or another, whereas
the vast majority of traditional non-electronic games are abstract. This is not, however, a
sufficient description of this split-the majority of commercial board games are also
representational (this may be because it is easier to market a representational game)-among
other reasons because the potential buyer cannot possibly predict the gameplay of a game
simply by reading the rules. In video games, the rules are initially hidden from the player-this
means that the player is more likely to use the game world to make inferences about the
rules. In fact, the player may need a fictional game world to understand the rules. In an
article discussing their rhythm game Amplitude (Harmonix 2003) and its predecessor
Frequency (Harmonix 2001), Greg Lopiccolo and Alex Rigopulos explain how the
introduction of recognizable elements can help the player understand the rules of the game
(figure 5.9):
To make sure new players could get the feel of the game right away, we redesigned the
interface in a number of ways, introducing a spaceship that the players steer to shoot lasers at
targets. This way, when a prospective player sees a screenshot of Amplitude, or watches
someone else play the game, he or she immediately reacts. "Oh, I get it. I'm, supposed to
shoot things."
Interestingly, this interface change really only affects players for the first few moments
they play. Thereafter, the player's attention ends up focused on the same three little target
spots that were the center of the interface in Frequency. But the key point here is that those
first few moments are absolutely crucial for luring in the new player. (Lopiccolo and
Rigopulos 2003, 43)
Even though fiction and rules are formally separable, the player's experience of the game
is shaped by both. The fictional world of a game can cue the player into making assumptions
about the game rules: In a game with a first-person perspective, the player facing evillooking monsters is likely to assume that the monsters are to be avoided or possibly
destroyed. If the images of the monsters were replaced by something benign, perhaps large
flowers, the player will likely make different assumptions about the rules of the game. It is
not just the graphical representation, but also the rules of the game that project the fictional
world. The way a given object or character behaves will characterize it as a fictional object;
the rules that the player deducts from the fiction and from the experience of the playing of
the game will also cue him or her into imagining a fictional world.5
Conflicts between Rules and Fictions: The Good and the Bad
In previous writings, I have assumed that the incongruence between rules and fiction was an
insurmountable obstacle for games (or game scholars) wanting to emphasize games as
fictional worlds (Juul 1998, 1999). A game may exhibit the problem that the rules and the
representation do not match; the representation may give the players reason to make
assumptions about the rules that turn out to be false; and the representation may fail to give
the player important information. There are certainly many examples of such problematic
relationships between rules and fiction. Myst, for example, is extremely inconsistent in
implementing the fictional world in the rules. Here, the player can manipulate the switch, but
the ship model cannot be touched (figure 5.10). This is a problem many games exhibit, but it
especially happens in the adventure game genre since the progression structure means that all
possible interactions in the game have to be explicitly programmed, and implementing even
the most obvious interactions requires more resources than are available for the development
of the game. In text-based adventure games, the mismatches can be even more jarring, such
as in this example from Witness (Infocom 1983):
I Figure 5.9 1
Frequency (Harmon ix 2001) and Amplitude (Harmonix 2003):
Identical rules, but easier to grasp with a spaceship metaphor.
>wait
The rain is falling heavily now.
>drink rain
(Sorry, but the program doesn't recognize the word "rain:")
In Myst and Witness, the fictional world gives the impression that many things are
possible that are not implemented in the rules. The reverse case is when the rules allow for
actions that the fictional word does not cue the player into expecting. Many first-person
shooters of the late 1990s featured wooden crates that turned out to contain medical kits and
other items that the player could pick up. For an inexperienced player, this is nonsensical and
not cued by the representation: Only the trained player knowing the conventions of the game
genre would understand it.
In the game of Hitman: Codenare 47, the player has to perform a number of
assassinations using any combination of stealth and violence. One of the stealth tricks is to
render harmless another character and steal his clothes. Since the protagonist, 47, is a very
tall bald man, the stolen clothes often do not look very credible, but the in-game characters
generally take no notice of this. The representation gives the impression that the disguise is
unconvincing, but the rules dictate that the other characters are convinced.' This appears
incongruous, but such incongruities can also be used as expressive devices. In the fighting
game Tekken 4, players can choose between a number of different characters. In this case, we
have chosen the small girl, Xiaoyu versus the big muscular Marduk (figure 5.11). The
representation of the game leads us to believe that Marduk is a stronger character than
Xiaoyu but, in actuality, her strength is on par with all the larger characters in the game
(figure 5.12). In my experience, the discrepancy between the outward appearance of the
characters and the rules governing their behavior tends to be considered humorous. Here, the
surprising difference between what the representation suggests and what the game rules
determine adds depth to the characters in the game. It also ties into the story of David versus
Goliath, and the supposedly amazing powers of martial arts. In this case, the representation
cues something that is contradicted by the rules, but this incongruence is an interesting effect.
Myst (Cyan 1993): The player can manipulate the switch, but not the
ship model.
Tekken 4 (Namco 2002): Xiaoyu versus Marduk.
Xiaoyu defeats Marduk.
Through the Glass Barrier: Characters Who Know You
If we assume that the fictional world of the game is a world, it would make sense to assume
that the characters in that world are therefore generally unaware of their being fictional
characters or being part of a game at all. In Super Mario Sunshine, many contextual clues are
provided to the player. In the following figure, the circled B signals that the player should
press the B button on the GameCube controller in order to engage in conversation (figure
5.13). The B is a contextual clue from the game interface, even if it is also a pseudo-threedimensional object in the game world. In a surprising twist, an in-game object called the
FLUDD talks about the layout of the GameCube controller (figures 5.14-5.15). It is a mixing
of fictional levels when an object in the fictional world knows about things in the real world
and knows that it is part of a GameCube game.
In another GameCube game, Pikrnin (Nintendo 2001), the protagonist is a scientist
stranded on an unknown planet. As the game progresses, the scientist takes notes in a diary
that is displayed on the screen, including notes about the game controller (figure 5.16). In
Pikrnin, the mixing of levels has an extra twist in that it is the protagonist, and by extension
the player, that is taking notes in a diary. From that perspective, taking notes on the game
controller makes sense, since this is exactly the kind of thing we would write down if we
were to take notes about our playing of the game.
We could easily frame this as being an interesting self-reflexive avantgarde praxis in the
tradition of French nouvelle vague cinema, but it has a more immediate effect when we
experience it. When an in-game character talks about how to use the controller, it rhetorically
befriends us, not just as in-game characters, but also as real-world players. The breakdown of
fictional levels is a positive emotional experience.
Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo 2002): Press B for conversation.
Satire
Any incongruity between rules and fiction can also be productive. As in any aesthetic field,
there is a chance that what is considered a problem can also be used as a positive effect.
Helene Madsen and Troels Degn Johansson examined how incongruities can be used as
satirical devices (2002). Following their analysis, I discussed two similar games in chapter 1
that do not display an arbitrary relation between rules and fiction: They are satires where the
love/hate relation that viewers have with TV presenters and the activity of creating video
game theory are both staged metaphorically as space battles. Countless satirical games follow
this pattern of framing a complex issue within a well-known video game genre.
Meeting the FLUDD device. FLUDD introduces itself.
FLUDD provides instructions. FLUDD knows the buttons on the
GameCube controller.
Pikmin (Nintendo 2001): The protagonist's diary discusses the
controller.
Can Rules and Fiction Match? Space in Video Games
Focusing on the differences between rules and fiction and the ways they can work against or
with each other, it is easy to overlook how they can, in some situations, completely overlap:
Space is a special issue between rules and fiction. The level design in a game may create an
emotionally evocative landscape and at the same time determine the shape of the game tree
and hence the gameplay of the game. On the "Wake Island" map in Battlefield 1942, the U.S.
side holds a U-shaped island, and the Japanese side must invade the island.
In figure 5.17, the topography of the island not only cues the player into imagining an
island, it also provides cover and hides information. The player can only see the attacking
airplane when it is too late. The shape of the island determines choke points, which points are
easily defendable or very vulnerable, and more generally what strategies will work for either
side on this map. At the same time, the physical layout of the level prompts the player into
imagining an island in the Pacific. As such, level design, space, and the shape of game
objects refer simultaneously to rules and fiction. This is a case in which rules and fiction do
overlap.
Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions 2002): The "Wake Island" map.
Implementing a World
Viewing games as rules, there is a sense in which all games are created equal, the difference
between different games being merely their rules and the challenges they present. This
suggests that any set of rules can in principle be made to be about anything, but as we have
seen, rules and fiction are quite intertwined. From a rules perspective, the most crucial role of
fiction is to cue the player into understanding the rules, and this easily leads us to the
assumption that games are thernable (Juul 2001b), that the representation and fiction of any
game can simply be replaced with something else. Since an attractive feature of games is the
way they challenge their players, games do not need an interesting fictional world or any
fictional world to be considered interesting, but this does not mean that fiction is irrelevant
for player experience or game quality.
A serious game design challenge is that at least some aspects of the fictional world have
to be implemented in rules, but that some things are easier to implement than others. Games
resist many of the more complex themes we can imagine, such as love, ambition, and social
conflict, because they are not easily implemented in rules. When games actually are about
these things, the actions that the player can perform are often simple, but the "complex"
events in the game are only presented in the fictional world, or happen as a result of the
player's simple actions. Myst contains a love story as well as a conflict between two brothers,
but neither of these are implemented in the rules of the game, they are simply presented to
the player once the player has performed some very simple mechanical tasks such as turning
stone wheels or moving objects about.' The Sims deals with this issue by letting characters
speak to each other using only simple sounds rather than actual language, and the player can
then imagine a dialogue from these sounds. This shows that the technical issue of what is
readily implemented in rules and/or programming influences the content of the fictional
worlds of video games.
The Blue Arrow of the Video Game
The importance of coherence in the fictional world of a game is an ongoing discussion in
game development circles. Noah Falstein has initiated the 400 project, a project of collecting
rules for creating good games. This is rule #7:
7. Maintain Suspension of Disbelief s
• With narrative, keep player in story
• Don't remind them "it's only a game"
• Domain is games with any narrative.
(Barwood and Falstein 2002)
As previously discussed, it is not entirely clear what definition of narrative is being used
here, but surely Grand Theft Auto III, with its numerous cutscenes and linear overall
structure, qualifies in Falstein's view. However, the game also has numerous incoherencies in
its fictional time (chapter 4), and like the Legend of Zelda game of the introduction, this
game also has large arrows that point to the rules of the game. Though Jeff Gerst- man's
review (2001) describes the game as a living, breathing place, he does not mention that the
game also features large blue arrows that point to the game rules.
Janet Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) helped popularize the idea of
immersion. Inspired by the holodeck of Star Trek, Murray claims that the ideal immersive
system would be a perfected virtual reality system that was indistinguishable from the real
world. This undoubtedly tapped into the then popular idea of virtual reality. Following
Murray, immersion has commonly been described as the feeling of being transported to a
fictional world, but as we have seen in the description of fiction in games, this is a
misleading account of what is going on in a video game. The player may be completely
absorbed by the game as a real-world activity, and the player may for the duration of the
game or in isolated parts of the game also strongly imagine the fictional game world. In
Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman name the exaggerated focus on immersion
the immersive fallacy (2004, 466-471). Focusing exclusively on coherent worlds and well
formed storytelling is a misunderstanding of what games are about.
What a Game Means
Even if games are not exclusively fictional worlds, they are nonetheless subject to constant
interpretation. But what does a game mean? It is very hard to create convincing
interpretations of the rules in a game themselves.9 One of the most discussed games is
SimCity, where as the mayor of a city, the player has to control land development, tax levels,
and so on (see figure 4.12). SimCity is not the actual world, but a model, and this model is
obviously based on a set of assumptions. Ted Friedman has claimed that "most
fundamentally, it rests on the empiricist, technophilic fantasy that the complex dynamics of
city development can be abstracted, quantified, simulated, and micromanaged" (1999). It
shines through that Friedman is against this fantasy. But if we actually play SimCity, the
experience is one of not being able to control a city. SimCity is an excellent example of a
game of emergence where the complexity of the game is far higher than the complexity of
the rules. In this way, SimCity is a prime example of how a city is unpredictable and
uncontrollable. The most important issue here is that Friedman not only ignores what it is
actually like to play the game, but also sidesteps the possibility of things like irony, parody,
and poetic license. We need to take a step back to consider how we interpret other art forms.
Where Is the Moral?
As a first example, consider Cecil B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments (1956). With
Charlton Heston playing the part of Moses, we follow the biblical tale of the birth of Moses,
his adoption, the exodus from Egypt, his parting the Red Sea, and his finally receiving the
Ten Commandments from God. In this film, it is clear that the protagonist is good, and that
his actions are good. We see the protagonist as the film's moral center, but are protagonists
always good? We can compare the Ten Commandments to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni:
The personal goal of Don Giovanni is to seduce as many women as possible, at which he is
sublimely skilled. Toward the end of the opera, Don Giovanni is offered the option of
repenting his sins, but he refuses and is finally swallowed by the flames of hell. It should be
clear that the moral of the opera is that God punishes sinners, and that the protagonist
demonstrates what we should not do. We do not automatically assume that the actions of a
protagonist are "good" or "right."
Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) is a more complex case. Here, the
protagonist commits a number of gruesome murders, all of which are described in great
detail. American Psycho is critical of modern society (that is, it is a warning against the
values and actions of the protagonist), but it can also be criticized for aestheticizing violence.
The same kind of criticism is easily directed toward Oliver Stone's movie Natural Born
Killers (1994), which presents itself as a critique of media fascination with violence while
being quite susceptible to the same kind of criticism. Such cases tend to be framed in
discussion of whether the violence is gratuitous or motivated within the context of the work.
Is the violence a part of the message or just a cheap trick for increasing sales? This is not
easily determined, and it is hard to reach any kind of clear interpretation of a movie or novel
concerning a dangerous or unpleasant aspect of the world: They can always be interpreted as
enjoying or glorifying a tragic aspect of reality or as warning against the same.
What Does Monopoly Mean?
Let us return to games. It has been a common assumption that the board game Monopoly
promotes the values of capitalism. Monopoly is of course a game with the goal of acquiring
as much money and property as possible, and this was straightforwardly interpreted as a
statement that we should acquire as much money and property as possible in real life. As a
response to this, Ralph Anspach created a countergame called Anti-Monopoly (Anspach
1973), in which the explicit goal is to break rather than create monopolies. As a game,
however, Anti-Monopoly is quite similar to Monopoly except for the names of the pieces
used: Players also move pieces around the board and collect other pieces, but rather than
collecting property, they collect assets to use for breaking monopolies. Following the
publication of Anti-Monopoly, Parker Brothers sued Ralph Anspach for violating the
copyright of Monopoly, but during the legal proceedings, it turned out that Monopoly was
itself a copy of Elizabeth J. Magie's 1903 game The Landlord's Game.10 The Landlord's
Game had been developed to educate the public about the evils of monopolies on land and,
more specifically, to promote the single tax system proposed by the economist Henry George
where only land is taxed. The instructions of The Landlord's Game state: "The object of this
game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the
present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other
enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation" (Salen and
Zimmerman 2004, 520). This demonstrates that two games with identical rules and fiction
can be interpreted as promoting and rejecting the creation of monopolies. The entire story of
Monopoly and its precursors can be found in Ralph Anspach's book The Billion Dollar
Monopoly (R) Swindle (1998).
A Meaningful Car Crash
It would be a misunderstanding to see a game as an expression of the players wanting to
perform the in-game actions in reality. Games-like stories-are things we use to relate to death
and disaster. Not because we want them to happen, but because we know they exist. Consider
the game Burnout 2. Burnout 2 can be played in a special crash mode, where the object is to
drive into a busy intersection at full speed in order to create the largest pile-ups possible
(figure 5.18). It should be obvious that we do not play this game because we want traffic
accidents, but because we know they exist and because we want to consider the possibility of
death and destruction. The audience of a movie does not automatically assume that the
protagonist does good, and neither does the player of a video game believe that the
protagonist of the game does good. A game is a play with identities, where the player at one
moment performs an action considered morally sound, and the next moment tries something
he or she considers indefensible. The player chooses one mission or another, tries to
complete the mission in one way or another, tries to do "good" or "evil." Games are
playgrounds where players can experiment with doing things they would or would not
normally do.
Literary theorist Stanley Fish has argued that the meaning of any given text is something
that is not strictly in the text, but is negotiated in a specific interpretive community (Fish
1980). There is no long tradition for interpreting video games, and hence no conventions or
community for upholding a specific interpretation. I do not think this should be followed to a
conclusion of blanket subjectivity; I think that having the tools for discussing games, and
remembering how we interpret other cultural forms, can prevent us from making naive,
literal interpretations of games.
Burnout 2: Point of Impact (Criterion Studios 2002), crash mode:
Create the largest traffic accident possible.
The Interplay between Rules and Fiction
Different games contain different types of fictional worlds. The rules of a game relate to the
kind of fictional world it can project. There is a general correlation between the progression
game structure and coherent worlds, perhaps because the fictional aspect of a game is more
important when the player only sees it once, and because it is easier to create a variety of
different actions when the implementation only has to work in a few selected cases.
Incoherent fictional worlds are often emergence games, perhaps because emergence
games have a stronger focus on their rules, and the incoherence of the fictional world is less
likely to be experienced as a problem in an emergence game than in a progression
(adventure) game. Breaking the coherence of the fictional world does not so much
foreground the way the game projects a fictional world as it foregrounds the rules, the game
as an activity. In a multiplayer game, breaking the coherence of the fictional world can work
as a foregrounding of the game as a real-life social activity. The lack of coherence in some
game worlds appears to originate in games being rule-based, and the resulting issues such as
creating interesting gameplay, modifying difficulty, and giving the player multiple attempts at
the same task.
Can rules and fiction ever match? Level design and the spatial layout of a game are the
prime examples of things that are part of rules as well as fiction. Should rules and fiction
match? Generally speaking, the mismatches may be a larger problem for novice players
because they are more likely to use cues from the fictional world in order to understand the
game rules. Seasoned players have more knowledge of game conventions and are therefore
more skilled at explaining fictional incoherence as the product of game rules. Fictional
incoherence and rules/fiction incongruities may in some circumstances make games
inaccessible to new players.
Finally, we can point to a set of conventions regarding rules and fiction in games:
• A game can use functional stylization to implement selected interesting aspects of the
fictional world.
• Space and level design in games are special areas where rules and fiction can overlap: The
shape of a fictional island, for example, also works like a rule in that it determines what the
player can or cannot do.
• Rules can cue the player into imagining a world.
• Fiction can cue the player into understanding the rules of the game.
• The player's real-world actions have a metaphorical relation to the fictional in-game action:
Pressing of a controller button at the right time means making a perfect serve.
• The interplay between rules and fiction of video games is what makes them half-real: real
rules and fictional worlds.
161
CONCLUSIONS
The intention of this book has been to create a basic theory of video games:
Video games are a combination of rules and fiction. Rules are definite
descriptions of what can and cannot be done in a game, and they provide
challenges that the player must gradually learn to overcome. Fiction is
ambiguous-the game can project more or less coherent fictional worlds that
the player then may imagine. The classic game model describes games on
three levels: the game itself, the player's relation to the game, and the
relation between playing and the rest of the world. The entire theory can
therefore be described as the intersection between games as rules and games
as fiction, and the relation between the game, the player, and the world
(table 6.1). The player may pick up a game, invent a game, or negotiate
game rules with other players. A game may exist before the player plays it,
but the player generally plays it because he or she wants to. Fiction cues the
player into understanding the rules, and rules can cue the player into
imagining a fictional world. This table does not imply causality-the theory
has no first principle or starting point, but many simultaneous parts that
interact.
The Classic Game Model
The classic game model is a way of capturing what a game is by describing
it in terms of the game itself, the player's psychological relation to the game,
and the relationship between the playing of the game and the rest of the
world. I have called this model classic because it describes almost all games
from 3000 BC to the end of the twentieth century. The classic game model
points out shared traits between most of the things we call "games," and,
because it is very open, can be used to differentiate games from each other.
The letters of the novel, the sound waves of music, and the images of film
are technical cores that are used for creating a diverse set of works that
produce a diverse set of experiences. Similarly, the model describes a core
that games share of rules, variable outcomes, values assigned to potential
outcomes, player effort, emotional attachment to the outcomes, and
negotiable consequences. The classic game model also helps us to see that
games are created and played using different tools: Games are transmedial,
and computers are a game medium. Sometimes it is easier to see a pattern
when it is broken, and the classic game model has perhaps become easier to
identify now that video games have evolved beyond it. In this way, the
model describes historical change and shows how games develop.
Table 6.1
Rules and fiction meet the game, the player, the world
Previously, I discussed to the dual origins of video games-the arcade
game and the adventure game. The economical conditions surrounding
arcade games demanded that play sessions be kept short. The promotional
flyer for the original Pong game stresses this by announcing, "Ball Serves
Automatically" (Gielens 2000, 6). The action game was initially tied to the
arcade model of short sessions in games that could never be completed;
moving away from arcade game conventions became a significant part of the
early commercial history of video games. This paved the way for persistent
games and save games that modify how the game outcome is defined, and
the proliferation of semi-official cheat codes has made it possible for players
to bend the rules of video games to accommodate their own wishes. Still,
arguably the most interesting departure is the appearance of games without a
clear valorized outcome. Even if games conforming to the classic game
model are hugely successful, they have a weakness: While a clear
valorization (goal) and emotional attachment to the outcome afford the
player an opportunity to succeed, they also mean that the player can fail
miserably. Additionally, when there is a clear goal, players are more or less
forced to focus on optimizing their strategies, but this may run counter to
what players want to do. SimCity, The Sims, and many role-playing games
do not have official goals, so the players are encouraged to set their own
personal short- or long-term goals. Conversely, Super Mario 64 and Grand
Theft Auto III do have official goals, but the player is mostly not critically
threatened, and can therefore choose to simply play around instead of trying
to reach the goal. If the classical game model forces players to optimize their
strategies and, to some extent, ignore the aesthetic value of the game pieces,
removing or weakening the game goal accommodates a wider range of
player types and game experiences. In such games, the player can choose to
buy a nice couch rather than an optimal couch.
Half-Real
I have called video games half-real, but an alternative term would be
halffictional. On a formal level, games are themable, meaning that a set of
rules can be assigned a new fictional world without modifying the rules. A
game can be changed from one setting to another; the gun can become a
green rectangle; the players can control wooden figures rather than
humanoid characters. Nevertheless, fiction matters in games and it is
important to remember the duality of the formal and the experiential
perspectives on fiction in games.
As it turns out, the formal rules of a game matter greatly to the experience
the player will have, but through a complicated process: Gameplay is the
interaction between the rules, the game tree, the players pursuing a goal, and
the players' personal repertoires and preferences. When playing a game,
events may occur that the designer did not predict, but even if many
emergent and non-intentional events can happen in a game, they still would
not happen without the game-it is the game that allows them to happen. If
we assume that the game designer will generally try to make the game
enjoyable, this means that when the instructions of a game inform the player
of a game goal, it is also implied that the game has been designed to be
entertaining when one pursues the goal, and that there is no guarantee that
pursuing a different goal will provide quality gameplay.
The fictional worlds that video games project cover a scale from the
elaborate and coherent adventure game to incoherent worlds to abstract
games. Chapters 4 and 5 gave examples of jarring contradictions and
inexplicable events in the fictional worlds of games-events that can only be
understood in the context of the rules of a game. The worlds that video
games project are often ontologically unstable, but the rules of video games
are very stable. While we may not be able to explain, in the game fiction,
why Mario reappears in Donkey Kong, we always know how many lives we
have left. That many fictional game worlds are incoherent does not mean
that video games are dysfunctional providers of fiction, but that they project
fictional worlds in their own flickering, provisional, and optional way. Of all
cultural forms that project fictional worlds, the video game is a special form
in which players can meaningfully engage with the game even while
refusing to imagine the world that the game projectsthe rules of a game are
often sufficient to keep the player's interest. Perhaps this places games on
par with songs, opera, and ballet-cultural forms that can project fiction but
can also be enjoyed even when one does not imagine the worlds that they
project.
The importance of the fictional level of a game can change over historical
time. I am unaware of any examples of this in the relative short history of
video games, but there are numerous cases in non-electronic games: Peter A.
Piccione (1980) has described how the game of senet originally was an
abstract game, but gradually became associated with the religious motif of
the soul's travels in the afterlife. However, this game appears to be a
precursor of Parcheesi and backgammon, in which this fictional association
has been lost.
In the Game
The affinity between computers and games is one of the ironies of human
history. The non-electronic games played and developed over thousands of
years have turned out to fit the modem digital computer extremely well.
Game players generally dislike having to argue about the rules of a game,
and hence they learn to specify rules that are unambiguous and algorithmic.
It is surprising that the rules of an old Egyptian game would fit something as
modern (and perhaps Western) as the digital computer, but it is only
surprising if we forget that the history of mathematics is long and, to a large
extent, a shared European-Middle Eastern-Asian history. The word
algorithm is derived from the name of the ninth-century Muslim
mathematician al-Khwarizmi, specifically from the Latin translation of his
treatise Al-Khwarizmi Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning
(Encyclopedia Britannica 2003). The history of the algorithm is a shared
European-Middle Eastern-Asian history, like the history of games.
We interpret an everyday word differently in the context of a poem, and
an ordinary object takes on new meaning when displayed in a gallery. We
prefer not to be involved in traffic accidents, but we may play video games
about creating traffic accidents. We may prefer not to have to clean the
house or take out the garbage, but we play video games about this anyway. A
game is a frame in which we see things differently. Literature can make us
focus on the words themselves. In the game, we can seek the beauty of the
activity itself.
Brian Eno has suggested that pop music is interesting due to the wide
range of people and expressions it can contain, covering a spectrum from
conceptually oriented musicians to people who are merely in it for style
(Kelly 1995). Perhaps what we are seeing is a widening of the video game
market: Hardcore game players often dislike the big game hits. That game
aficionados can scoff at the tastes of the general public is merely an
indication that games are becoming like pop music. The rift between the
hardcore and the casual gamer-and between different player types-is a sign
of the maturity of the medium. Although there is a core that most video
games share of challenges and fictional worlds, innovative games are often
those that create interest in what has hitherto been considered boring or
unimportant. Innovative games are also discussions about what a game is.
From a historical perspective, The Sims mirrors the appearance of the
realistic novel of the late nineteenth century, when, broadly speaking, novels
began to describe everyday life rather than heroes and dramatic events. Art
forms develop in part by shifting emphasis: The details of everyday life can
be interesting; painting does not have to represent anything; rhythm can be
as important as melody. Video games develop the same way.
That the rules of a game are real and formally defined does not mean that
the player's experience is also formally defined. However, the rules help
create the player's informal experience. Though the fictional worlds of
games are optional, subjective, and not real, they play a key role in video
games. The player navigates these two levels, playing video games in the
half-real zone between the fiction and the rules.
Notes
1 Introduction
1. The shift from abstract to representational games is not just a shift from
the non-electronic to the computer, but also from non-commercial
games to commercial games.
2. Wittgenstein writes about "Spiele," which is a broader category than
"games."
3. I have previously reviewed The Study of Games (Juul 2001c).
4. Foursquare is played on four squares painted on the ground. Hughes lists
three basic rules of the game:
• Hit a ball that lands in your square to another square.
• Let the ball bounce once, but only once, in your square.
• Don't hit a ball that lands in another square. (Hughes 1999, 99)
5. Hitting the ball very hard at an opponent.
6. Mateas and Stern's Facade project (2004) is arguably the most advanced
attempt at building such a system to date.
7. See Fluegelman 1976 for a collection of mostly non-competitive, yet
charming, games.
2 Video Games and the Classic Game Model
1. The idea of a describing a classic model of a historically changing field
comes from Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985.
2. According to F. M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, cultures without
games do exist (1971, 4-5).
3. Ring-a-ring o' roses is a children's game (game in a broad sense) where
the participants hold hands and sing:
(Everybody falls over.)
4. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga devotes an entire chapter to an examination
of the concept of play in different languages (1950, 28-45).
5. In the works quoted here, Wittgenstein's use of Spiel is translated as
game; Roger Caillois's use of jeux is translated as play and games.
6. This table was inspired by Salen and Zimmerman's work on game
definitions, where they provide a more fine-grained but less generalized
table of eight different game definitions (2004, 95).
7. See Schneider and Butcher 1997 for a critique of the concept of prelusory
goals.
8. The possibility of betting hinges on the quantitative outcome of a game-it
is only possible to bet if the outcome is beyond discussion.
9. In the MIT Assassins' Guild game played on February 23, 2003, the rules
stated the following:
Non-Players: Not everyone in the world is playing in this game. Some
nonplayers (NPs) like to sleep or study undisturbed; others just don't like
having toy guns waved in their faces.... NPs may not knowingly affect
the game. They may not be used to hold items or information. They may
not help you kill someone. Do not use the presence of NPs to hide from
rampaging mobs that want your blood.
(MIT Assassin's Guild 2003, 1)
10. Some judged sports such as figure skating rely on the extra layer of
judges to transform the qualitative movement of the skater into a
quantitative outcome. See Suits 1995 for a discussion.
11. Some of the enjoyment of pen and paper role-playing games is due to
the flexibility of the rules.
12. Conversely, Wolf (2001) has described the video game as a medium in
itself in The Medium of the Video Game.
13. That the body of the computer game player is not part of the state
machine gives flexibility since the player likely does not have the
physical shape or skill needed to perform the sport on a professional
level in real life.
14. Mapping between space and mathematics is in fact how a computer
handles 3-D graphics-since the computer does not have a real space
inside, the space in a computer game is handled as numerical values in
the computer. (Technically, the computer does not really handle
numbers-it only handles electrical signals which can be used to
represent numbers.)
15. The equivalence between tic-tac-toe and the mathematical game was
described by Newell and Simon (1972, 59-63).
3 Rules
1. Game theory generally uses strategy as an overall term that also
encompasses the short-term planning often known as tactics.
2. If the players of a game become aware of a dominant strategy, this
always makes the game uninteresting.
3. Video games of perfect information are mostly non-scrolling 2-D games.
4. See, for example, Selic, Gullekson, and Ward 1994.
5. Here are two concrete examples of state machines:
In chess, the initial state is the setup of the board. The set of input
events corresponds to the permissible moves. It has a state transition
function (rules) that determines what happens in reaction to specific
movessuch as moving pieces, capturing pieces, and more complex
events such as castling. In the state machine perspective, it is the output
function of the game that determines what output is produced at a given
time. Since chess is a game of perfect information (the entire game state
is visible to all players at all times), the output function of chess simply
outputs the entire game state at every move.
In a game like Quake III Arena, the initial state is the starting position
of the players on a level. The set of input events is the different actions
that each player can perform: move, jump, shoot, change weapon. The
state transition function determines what happens as a consequence of
the player actions and the current game state-players jumping, missiles
moving through the air. The output function sends a specific view of the
game state to each player, only showing them what is visible from their
character's perspective in the game world.
6. Unless the machine is broken.
7. When informally playing soccer on an open field, rule #1 may be used.
8. According to Suber, "Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a
move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The
primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the
wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding
what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of
the game, of course, can be changed" (1990, Appendix 3B, 362).
9. In the U.S. Open men's singles tennis final on September 8, 2003, Andy
Roddick played against Juan Carlos Ferrero. In the third set Ferrero
returned a ball that hit the top of the net, stopped almost completely, yet
barely fell on Roddick's side of the net, with no chance for Roddick to
reach it. Ferrero raised his hand, apologizing. What happened was
entirely within the rules of tennis-the raised hand simply implied that it
was a chance occurrence beyond his control.
10. Note the difference between the rules of Pong and the rules of the game
of table tennis: In the real world, the ball will naturally bounce off the
table and the player bats, in a video game this has to be explicitly
specified in programming.
It. The progression /emergence distinction focuses on the overall structure
of a game, whereas Crawford's distinction focuses on the way the game
is programmed. These two distinctions will mostly overlap.
12. See also Crawford 1987.
13. See my article "The Open and the Closed" for a more detailed
discussion of Ever Quest and emergence (Juul 2002).
14. A more detailed history of adventure games can be found in Montfort
2003.
15. Gameplay is sometimes used in a broader sense to describe the total
game experience, but I am focusing on gameplay as the dynamic aspect
of games.
16. Tuning the relation between different weapons, units, or sides of a game
is known as balancing (see also Rollings and Morris 2000, chap. 5).
17. In other words, it is wrong to assume that Counter-Strike is popular
either because of the game itself or because of the community around
the game: Counter-Strike is popular because the gameplay makes
community-building a good meta-strategy for winning the game and
because these communities were actually built.
18. Since the number of apples in the basket is doubled every minute, the
basket was half full one minute before noon-at 11:59.
19. The home page of the project is www.gamedesignpatterns.org.
20. Kreimeier 2003 provides an overview of these three projects.
21. Then again, the joy of winning correlates positively to the amount of
frustration experienced on the way, but the general trend from the 1980s
on has been to make games easier, or at least to give the player more
small victories and fewer long stretches of frustration.
4 Fiction
1. Fictional primarily means imagined here. It is not an evaluation of truth
value.
2. This is also found in some avant-garde novels, such Alain RobbeGrillet's La Jalousie (1957), which contain contradictory statements.
3. We might wrongly assume that since any game has multiple outcomes,
any game is a contradictory world. This means that we might place
games in the category of avant-garde fiction, but this is not entirely true.
A better explanation is that while a given game can have many different
outcomes, it still sets up a dynamic fictional world that can be coherent
within a single game session.
4. Haptics (relating to the sense of touch) is the physical feedback from
game controllers and other devices that typically vibrate in response to
game events.
5. See Klevjer 2002 for a discussion of cut-scenes.
6. While any game can be imagined in any number of ways, this does not
mean that all players imagine a specific world in completely different
ways. An interpretation of a game world can be more or less convincing.
(This interpretation of Battlezone has little credibility since we can
demonstrate that it is based on unsubstantiated rumors.) General
conventions for how to interpret and imagine fictional worlds will
influence the way the player imagines a game world.
7. Wolf (2001) categorizes different kinds of video game spaces in The
Medium of the Video Game.
8. In Introduction to Game Time (Juul 2004a), I called this "event time." I
believe that "fictional time" is a more descriptive term.
9. The play time-fictional time relation depends somewhat on the player's
familiarity with the game events. The real-time strategy game StarCraft
(Blizzard Entertainment 1998) is set in space, and the player does not
have a strong expectation of the speed of the units of the Zergs or the
Protoss. The speed selection is consequently not described in relation to
the play time (such as "twice as fast"), but simply called "normal" or
"faster."
10. Flash-forwards can be included to indicate either something outside the
player's influence or something that the player has to fight to reach. (But
this will not make sense as a flash-forward if the player does not reach
it.)
11. This kind of paradox can be found in Max Payne (Remedy 2001), where
the game simply restarts the flashback level if the player fails.
12. The prevalence of unchronological time in narratives is afforded by
their fixed nature. Since the story is already determined, the events can
easily be presented in non-chronological order for aesthetic effect.
13. There are several specific variations of this: narrative as a set of
chronologically ordered events, narrative as a sequence of causally
related events, and Greimas's canonical narrative, where a subject tries
to attain an object from a giver for the benefit of receiver (cf. Prince
1987, 58-59, 91-92).
14. This is strictly speaking not a definition of narrative, but a
characterization-most narratives are about human or anthropomorphic
agents.
15. See Aarseth 2004a for another critique of the term.
16. These examples share a transgression of common morals, and that is
probably a source of enjoyment.
5 Rules and Fiction
1. On the other hand, when a video game is played on a computer, the word
processor is also inside the computer, yet outside the game. On the
keyboard of a Windows machine, the Windows key is outside the game
since pressing it stops the game and brings the user to the desktop; some
keys on the keyboard are part of the game, and some keys are outside.
2. On simulation, see Frasca 2001b and Aarseth 2004a.
3. The stylization of a simulation corresponds quite closely to the editing of
a film or a novel: It determines emphasis and works with player/ viewer
expectations.
4. Some games do include the possibility that the car can run out of gas; the
point is that every game only implements selected aspects of the fictional
world.
5. Even the movement of purely abstract shapes is easily interpreted as
signifying something. In Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles (1984), a
number of experiments are described in which extremely simple
machines are attracted to or repelled by each other. Even such simple
rules cue us into imagining emotions for these abstract shapes.
6. There are some precedents for this in folk tales and myths, and in
premodern stories in general, where characters successfully pose as other
characters using semi-magical disguises. For example, in Beethoven's
opera Fidelio, Leonore disguises herself as a boy (named "Fidelio") and
takes a job at the prison where her husband is wrongfully imprisoned in
order to save him. Disguises also play major parts in several of
Shakespeare's plays.
7. Freeman (2004) discusses various techniques for adding emotional depth
to games.
8. The suspension of disbelief means that readers or viewers must willingly
suspend their disbelief in order to accept that the person on stage is not
an actor, but the person he or she represents. The idea is usually
attributed to Coleridge.
9. See Petschar 1993 for a very unconvincing interpretation of the rules of
chess.
10. The Landlord's Game is U.S. patent 748,626.
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Games
Key to platforms:
Amiga: Commodore Amiga.
Arcade: Arcade game.
Board: Board game.
C64: Commodore 64.
DC: Sega Dreamcast.
GBA: Gameboy Advance.
GC: Nintendo Gamecube.
Mac: Apple Macintosh.
N64: Nintendo 64.
PC: PC, DOS or Windows.
PS: Sony Playstation.
PS2: Sony Playstation 2.
SNES: Super Nintendo.
WWW: Web-based game.
Xbox: Xbox.
Amusement Vision. Super Monkey Ball 2. Sega, 2002. (GC)
Anim-X. Majestic. Electronic Arts, 2001. (PC)
Anspach, Ralph. Anti-Monopoly. 1974. (Board)
Atari. Pong. Atari, 1973. (Arcade)
Atari. Asteroids. Atari, 1979. (Arcade)
Atari. Battlezone. Atari, 1980. (Arcade)
Atari. Star Wars. Atari, 1983. (Arcade)
Atari. Tetris. Atari, 1986. (Arcade)
Bally Midway. Rampage. Bally Midway, 1986. (Arcade)
Blizzard Entertainment. StarCraft. Blizzard Entertainment, 1998. (PC)
B1ueSky Software. Risk. Hasbro Interactive, 1997. (PC)
Blue Byte. The Settlers. Strategic Simulations, Inc, 1994. (PC)
Cinemaware. Defender of the Crown. Cinemaware, 1986. (Amiga)
Core Design Ltd. Tomb Raider. Eidos Interactive, 1996. (PC)
The Counter-Strike Team. Counter-Strike. 2000. (PC)
Creative Assembly. Shogun: Total War. Electronic Arts, 2000. (PC)
Criterion Studios. Burnout 2: Point of Impact. Acclaim, 2002. (PS2)
Crowther, Willie, and Don Woods. Adventure. 1976. (Mainframe)
Cyan. Myst. Broderbund, 1993. (Mac)
Data East. Burger Time. Bally Midway, 1982. (Arcade)
Denki Limited. Denki Blocks. Rage Software, 2001. (GBA)
Digital Illusions. Battlefield 1942. Electronic Arts, 2002. (PC)
Electronic Arts. FIFA 2002. 2002. (Xbox)
Ensemble Studios. Age of Empires II. Microsoft, 1999. (PC)
Exidy. Death Race. Exidy, 1976. (Arcade)
Epic MegaGames. Unreal Tournament. GT Interactive, 1999. (PC)
Funcom. The Longest journey. IQ Media Nordic, 2000. (PC)
Harmonix. Frequency. SCEA, 2001. (PS2)
Harmonix. Amplitude. SCEA, 2003. (PS2)
Hasbro Interactive. Axis & Allies. Hasbro Interactive, 1998. (PC)
Hitmaker. Virtua Tennis. Sega, 2000. (DC)
ID Software. Quake III Arena. Electronic Arts, 1999. (PC)
Infocom. Witness. Infocom, 1983. (PC)
10 Interactive. Hitman: Codename 47. Eidos Interactive, 2000. (PC)
Ion Storm. Deus Ex. Eidos Interactive, 2000. (PC)
Juul, Jesper. Puls in Space. 1998a. (WWW) Available at
http://www.soup.dk/ pspace/ (accessed November 7, 2004).
Juul, Jesper. Game liberation. Published in the M/C journal, November
2000. (WWW) Available at http://www.jesperjuul.net/gameliberation/
(accessed November 7, 2004).
Konami. Dance Dance Revolution. Konami, 2001a. (PS)
Konami. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Konami, 2001b. (PS2)
Lionhead Studios. Black d2' White. EA Games, 2001. (PC)
Magic, Elizabeth J. The Landlord's Game. 1904. (Board)
Mateas, Michael, and Andrew Stern. Facade. 2004. (PC)
Maxis. SimCity. Broderbund, 1989. (PC)
Maxis. The Sims. Electronic Arts, 2000. (PC)
Maxis. SimCity 4. Electronic Arts, 2003. (PC)
Maxis. The Sims 2. Electronic Arts, 2004. (PC)
Melbourne House. The Hobbit. Melbourne House, 1984. (C64)
Milton Bradley. Frogger. 1981. (Board)
Milton Bradley. Pac-Man. 1982. (Board)
Milton Bradley. Berzerk. 1983. (Board)
Namco. Galaga. Namco, 1981. (Arcade)
Namco. Pac-Man. Namco, 1980. (Arcade)
Namco. Tekken 3 Tag Tournament. Namco, 2000. (PS2)
Namco. Tekken 4. Namco, 2002. (PS2)
NaNaOn-Sha. Vib-Ribbon. SCEI, 1999. (PS)
Nintendo. Donkey Kong. Nintendo, 1981. (Arcade)
Nintendo. Super Metroid. Nintendo, 1993. (SNES)
Nintendo. Super Mario 64. Nintendo, 1996. (N64)
Nintendo. Pikmin. Nintendo, 2001. (GC)
Nintendo. Super Mario Sunshine. Nintendo, 2002. (GC)
Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Nintendo, 2003a. (GC)
Nintendo. WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$. Nintendo, 2003b. (G BA)
Nova Game Design. Axis & Allies. Milton Bradley, 1984. (Board)
Origin Systems. Ultima Online. Origin Systems, 1997. (PC)
Parker Brothers. Monopoly. 1936. (Board)
Pazhitnov, Alexey. Tetris. Spectrum Holobyte, 1985. (PC)
Planet Moon Studios. Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Interplay, 2000. (PC)
Polyphony Digital. Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. SCE A, 2001. (PS2)
Power and Magic. Top Spin. Microsoft, 2003. (Xbox)
Remedy. Max Payne. Take 2 Interactive, 2001. (PC)
Rockstar Games. Grand Theft Auto III. Take-Two Interactive, 2001. (PS2)
Rogue Entertainment. American McGee's Alice. Electronic Arts, 2000. (PC)
Russell, Stephen. Spacewar! 1961. (PDP-1 mainframe.) Available at http://
lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar/ (accessed November
7, 2004).
Sales Curve Interactive. Carmageddon. Interplay, 1997. (PC)
Sega. Pengo. Sega, 1982. (Arcade)
Sega-AM2. Shenmue. Sega, 2000. (DC)
Sonic Team. ChuChu Rocket. Sega, 2000. (DC)
Peter Suber. Nomic. 1982. (Mind game)
Taito. Space Invaders. Taito, 1977. (Arcade)
Taito. Bust A-Move 4. Taito, 1998. (PS2)
Three Rings Design. Puzzle Pirates. 2003. (WWW) Available at http://
www.puzzlepirates.com (accessed November 7, 2004).
Valve Software. Half-Life. Sierra, 1998. (PC)
Verant Interactive. Ever Quest. Sony Online Entertainment, 1999. (PC)
Movies
DeMille, Cecil B. The Ten Commandments. 1956.
Cameron, James. Titanic. 1997.
Stone, Oliver. Natural Born Killers. 1994.
Welles, Orson. Citizen Kane. 1941.
Index